Our old age homes didn’t develop out of a desire to give the frail elderly better lives than they’d had in those dismal places. We didn’t look around and say to ourselves, “You know, there’s this phase of people’s lives in which they can’t really cope on their own, and we ought to find a way to make it manageable.” No, instead we said, “This looks like a medical problem. Let’s put these people in the hospital. Maybe the doctors can figure something out.” The modern nursing home developed from there, more or less by accident.
