To sell medical students on joys of geriatrics, send in 90-year-olds

When doctors told Robert Madison that his wife had dementia, they didn't explain very much. His successful career as an architect hardly prepared him for what came next. "A week before she passed away her behavior was different, and I was angry because I thought she was deliberately not doing things," Madison, now 92, told a group of nearly 200 students at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in Cleveland. "You are knowledgeable in treating patients, but I'm the patient, too, and if someone had said she can't control anything, I would have been better able to understand what was taking place."