Curating moral imagination

The arts and humanities have a long history of engagement with both medicine and management, although this overlapping interest has only recently begun to develop between medicine and management. Since the end of the last century, however, there has been concern on the one hand that the arts and humanities have been doing little more than servicing either of these disciplines, rather than providing the means to rethink them in a broader and more systematic way, and broaden and deepen understandings of what professional practice means in both medicine and management. This chapter looks at two of the originators of the medical humanities on both sides of the Atlantic and relates their work on developing “moral imagination” to the development of critical medical humanities and critical management studies (and related aesthetic approaches). As an example of how contributions from both areas might complement each other, it looks more closely at Calman&s;s Contagious Theory of Behaviour and makes some “critically progressive” recommendations for future approaches to engaging the arts and humanities in professional education.