A 90-day-old baby was transported to my emergency department recently. A poorly worded note with a brief medical history and list of medicines accompanied the frail little guy.

Of course, the patient couldn’t tell us his problem; he only occasionally would let out a feeble cry. We tried for hours to reach his family and his physician, but nobody responded. After conducting exhaustive testing, I could find nothing wrong with this lovable creature of God. We couldn’t just send him back, so we were forced to admit him.

Now, read those paragraphs again and substitute “90-year-old man.”

If a baby had been truly dropped on our doorstep and no one had come to claim him, it would have been big news. The event might have made the front page of the newspaper or been the lead story on the evening news broadcast. Even the most cold-hearted person in the hospital (I’ll leave it to you to decide who that might be) would have been outraged at the lack of responsibility and the catastrophic moral failure of his caregivers.

Fortunately, babies on the doorstep are an infrequent occurrence. Why is it that oldies on the doorstep are a daily occurrence in most emergency departments?

Elderly people who can help themselves no better than an infant are sent from home or the extended care facility (ECF), and no one comes with them. Little useful information is communicated about the reason for their visits, and emergency physicians and nurses are left in the situation in which a veterinarian often finds herself. It’s probably worse, though—people usually accompany their dogs or cats to the animal hospital.

I’ll go out on a limb and predict that if at the same time a demented octogenarian and a golden retriever were left unattended at the door of my department, more sympathy would be generated for the dog. The reporters would trip over the feet of the man to get a good picture of the canine.

It’s clear that as a society we place a higher standard on the care of infants (and possibly dogs) than the care of the frailest of our oldest citizens.

It’s not because one is more helpless than the other. It’s not because one life is intrinsically more valuable than another. What do these infants have that most of the elderly folks don’t have?