ABSTRACT
The medical/social boundary for older people is one of the most significant divisions in public policy, for their needs typically fall across this great fault-line of public provision. The emergence of modern medicine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was accompanied by a change in the conceptualisation of illness and its relationship to the body. The last of the sets of discourses within which the body in social care is contained are those of ordinary social life. The expertise of social work lies in feelings, relationships and social functioning; and traditionally it sees its authority as stopping short of the body, which is handed over to medicine. Personal care has effectively been transferred out of health and into social care with all the consequences for its management, financing and personnel base. The asymmetrical character of the relationship means that the social care side of policy has only been weakly articulated.
