Issues relating to health, illness and well-being affect individuals, their families, wider relationships, communities and societies. The boundaries within families, for example, as expressed through gendered roles, or between families and the wider community may all be challenged and redrawn in response to threats to health and well-being. The maintenance of well-being itself may require boundary construction, to ensure time for self or leisure is maintained despite caring and work commitments.

The three chapters comprising this part of the book focus on very different aspects of health, illness and well-being. The first chapter, by Backett-Milburn, Airey and McKie, provides a gendered, lifecourse perspective on health, medicine and well-being. Wellbeing, it is argued, may be a useful concept through which to challenge conventional boundaries around ageing, health and illness. The chapter focuses on a study of women in their fifties and examines how the boundaries of caring and providing intersect with lifecourse stage, biographical history and social and familial circumstances. The experience of ageing can only be understood within that wider context and, at this time of life, boundaries around families and relationships seem to be both sustained and challenged. For example, changing patterns of employment suggest new boundaries between work and home; respondents in the study also reported a sense of a freeing up of time for their own interests, challenging traditional boundaries and expectations around women's ageing. However, caring responsibilities across the generations invoke more traditionally gendered roles; ambiguity and ambivalence were present in the women's accounts of this time in their lives. Wider personal relationships were described as important sources of support and knowledge about the ageing process, signifying changing dynamics between family and friends.

The chapter by Weaks, Wilkinson and Davidson (Chapter Nine) focuses more specifically on the effect of a particular disease diagnosis on relationships within a longer-term marriage. Two case studies are presented where one partner, in both cases a man, has been diagnosed with dementia. The authors take a social constructionist perspective in relation to the definition and impact of dementia and concentrate on how boundaries and relationships are co-constructed through the illness trajectory. Dementia challenges established roles and boundaries; in both case study couples, different roles within the marriage were created, sometimes quickly and sometimes gradually