2006 Linda Crane Lecture Sources of Inspiration

Cardiopulmonary Physical Therapy Journal, Jun 2006 by Hinman, Martha R

I would like to thank the members of the Cardiovascular and Pulmonary, Education, and Pediatrics sections for giving me this opportunity to share my thoughts with you this afternoon, as well as my former colleagues at the University of Texas Medical Branch who nominated me for this honor. As you might imagine, I consider it a privilege to be here today to pay tribute to my friend and colleague, Linda Crane. Linda and I worked together several years ago at the University of New England and we managed to keep in touch after we both departed Maine for warmer climates. Linda was a beloved friend and an unforgettable colleague, and I'm definitely a better person for having known her.

Once I found out that I would be delivering this year's memorial lecture, I quickly realized that I didn't have a clue as to what I should talk about. I thought a lot about why we honor people like Linda-we have many awards, scholarships, and lectureships at the national, state, and local levels that are named for colleagues who have made substantial contributions to our profession and influenced our thinking and practice. So I began to wonder what it was about these people that made them so inspirational to us, and whether this was a characteristic that the rest of us can learn. I discovered that I wasn't sure exactly what it meant to be inspirational. My research instincts told me to go to the literature first and see what had been written about inspiration as it relates to health care. My first mistake was to enter the word 'inspiration' into the search engine because all the results related to articles on pulmonary function. So I tried again using the term 'inspirational' and this narrowed the field down to almost nothing. At that point I decided it would be appropriate to study this topic more thoroughly from a physical therapy perspective and see if I couldn't offer you some insights regarding the meaning and nature of this phenomenon. I had three questions that I wanted to answer:

* What is inspiration?

* Where do we find it?

* How does it affect what we do as physical therapists?

What I will present this afternoon are the results of a qualitative study that triangulates data obtained from 3 sources: the health care literature, personal interviews with physical therapists, and a case study of Linda Crane based on interviews with her family and close friends. Although I have chosen not to contribute my own responses to this data collection, you will undoubtedly notice the influence of one of my personal sources of inspiration in this presentation. And I will leave you with 3 principles that I have gleaned from my study that you can integrate into your own lives and work if you want to be inspirational to others and exemplify what I will refer to later as a "Crane-ic" philosophy of life.

As I have already mentioned the concept of inspiration does not appear to have been studied much in the health care literature, but I have chosen a few articles to briefly share with you today. The first study was published in the nursing literature where inspiration has frequently been related to the concept of hope. In this article, Cutcliffe1 describes hope as something that allows us to experience a higher quality of life and consider our future. He suggests that hope is something that requires nurturing which, in this study, was provided by nurses who were involved in the caregiving process. He identifies and describes 4 types of behaviors that these nurses used to inspire hope in their terminally ill patients. In summarizing his findings, he concludes that "the presence of another human being who conveys unconditional acceptance, tolerance and understanding should not be under-estimated in terms of its therapeutic value and foundation for hope inspiration."1

Another study that was published in the psychotherapy literature focused more on how patients inspired clinicians. In this study, Kahn and Harkavy-Friedman2 attempted to document positive emotional, cognitive, or behavioral changes that occurred in social workers as a result of working with inspiring patients and examine how this inspiration affected the therapeutic relationship. Each clinician was asked to respond to a survey while thinking about a patient that he or she considered to be inspirational. Frequently cited changes that occurred as a result of working with these inspirational patients included: positive role modeling for a personal or professional change, an increased understanding of others and abandonment of stereotypes, changing priorities or perspectives that made their own lives more pleasurable, acquisition of new interests or activities, the ability to deal with own problems by identifying with the patient's pathology, and an increased spiritual awareness. Overall, the most inspiring characteristics of the patients described were their ability to overcome or cope with adversity, their ability to make changes in their lives, their courage and their persistence.

One other article represented a personal tribute to a British oncologist named Dr. Jimmy Ledingham.3 It was written by one of his former medical interns, Dr. Alison Douglas, who describes his inspiration in terms of the way he interacted with his patients and how he taught by example. She says: