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In Not for Profit (2010), Martha Nussbaum has diagnosed that alongside a global economic crisis, a less visible, more insid-ious catastrophe is also affecting Western societies, namely the underfunding of the arts and humanities. Working against the increasing commercialization of the academy, Nussbaum sets out a vision of the arts, and especially literature, as central to the functioning of a healthy democratic society, first because they underpin skills of reasoning, argument, and critique, and secondly because they cultivate imaginative, caring, and empathic citizens. Nussbaum’s passionate defense of the humanities coincides, and to some degree overlaps, with the emergence of the medical humanities over the past decade or so. Tying the notion of the “healthy” society more particularly to health-care institutions and systems, the medical humanities have pointed to a contemporary crisis of care in Western …