Although all recorded societies have contained a few people of extreme old age, they have been the exception rather than the rule. The possibility of one fifth of the total population in retirement from active employment would have been unthinkable at the beginning of the twentieth century and even social planning in the 1970s had made no adequate provision for a society in which one in every twenty-five people would be over seventy-five and one in every hundred over eighty-five within less than a decade.

In Great Britain in the 1970s, however, and in many industrialised societies, this was now a reality and vast resources would need to be directed towards the support, care and treatment of the aged. Whilst a growing body of knowledge, based upon biological and clinical studies of the ageing process, had been accumulated in recent years, only a modest investment had been made in social gerontology.

Originally published in 1978, this book provided a multi-disciplinary study of the process of ageing for those in the caring professions as well as for planners and architects, whose decisions and designs affected the lives of the elderly. It is divided into three parts: the first provides a sociological, demographic and cultural background to the place of old people in eastern and western societies. The second explores the relationship which exists (or should exist) between a number of professional disciplines and part three considers an interdisciplinary model in practice. Today it can be read in its historical context.