"At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the western world. In the margins of community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands where sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable."
Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (pg. 3, 1965, United States of New York, Random House Inc.)
The leper was excluded from normal society and by excluding him, society defined itself. The unhealthy and frightening was excluded, the healthy and safe was accepted. Leprosy existed in a particular "space" within society. This space was both real and imaginary; buildings were created to house the excluded lepers, but they also existed in a certain cultural space on the edge of the normal community. The "wastelands" that Foucault describes are partly a creation of the mind; they were eventually repopulated by madmen, who replaced the lepers as an excluded class. Madness does not resemble leprosy, but in a way Foucault believes that it occupies the same place in society.
Apply theory to dementia by pointing out that although people with dementia shouldn't be stigmatised as "mad", they are (in western societies) put quietly aside in the corner in care homes and dementia units, cast aside to the invisible spaces as 'the mad old lady down the road'. They are surely a modern version of the lepers in the sense that they are an excluded class.
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