The Person in Dementia : University of Toronto Press : 9781551116068 : 1551116065 : 01 Oct 2006 : Winner of the Society for Medical Anthropology's 2009 New Millennium Award Imagine yourself in advanced age, forced to depend on others for all your basic needs. What would you want to retain of your personal life? This question is at the heart of a set of case studies that examine the lives of nursing home residents who were diagnosed with senile dementia. Based on two years of intensive comparative ethnographic study in a nursing home in a Northeastern American city, The Person in Dementia dramatically contrasts the outcomes of two approaches to dementia care for elders with severely disturbed behaviors: a task-oriented approach based on a biomedical view of disease progression and a flexible person-sustaining approach focusing on individual needs and communication. By emphasizing "personhood," which looks beyond physical and reasoning abilities to a person's will and relationship with