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Mary Beard reflects on recent TV programmes and newspaper articles about what's going on in care homes for the elderly.
She says she believes that in a few hundred years' time, "our treatment of old people will be as much of a blot on our culture as Bedlam and the madhouses were on the culture of the 18th century".
But she also argues that our view of dementia is a sanitized one. She says we have to recognize that dementia can make its sufferers truculent and aggressive...something that most of us - not just care workers on a minimum wage - would find very difficult to deal with.
Producer: Adele Armstrong.
By BBC Radio 44.6
7373 ratings
Mary Beard reflects on recent TV programmes and newspaper articles about what's going on in care homes for the elderly.
She says she believes that in a few hundred years' time, "our treatment of old people will be as much of a blot on our culture as Bedlam and the madhouses were on the culture of the 18th century".
But she also argues that our view of dementia is a sanitized one. She says we have to recognize that dementia can make its sufferers truculent and aggressive...something that most of us - not just care workers on a minimum wage - would find very difficult to deal with.
Producer: Adele Armstrong.

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