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.