ABSTRACT
Science and medical innovation offer us one view of dementia, but it is in the telling of stories and the listening to others' experience that the problems and the possibilities become real. It is this social dimension, the way dementia is lived and how it becomes a part of life and death that requires a blurring of boundaries between specialist areas and requires a rereading of the Christian story and a re-evaluation of what it means to be human. Since the early 1990s, the amount of literature that has been written on the subject of dementia has increased dramatically, as both neuroscience and the social sciences have developed their understanding of the disease. In order to understand dementia we need to look at the medical, social, psychological and spiritual aspects of what it means to be human. As we enter the twenty-first century, dementia was still being defined in terms of a loss of brain function which is usually progressive.
