It’s jarring to think that our age—unlike our height or weight—can’t be precisely measured. One can count the rings on a tree to calculate how many years it was alive, but there’s no equivalent marker in humans. Every so often, in the hospital where I work, I notice that a patient has a listed age of more than a hundred and twenty. This is disorienting until I realize that the patient may have come into the hospital with no I.D. and no known contacts, and that they might be suffering from a condition—dementia, schizophrenia—that makes it hard for them to remember who they are, let alone how old. In such cases, the hospital’s computer system defaults to a birth year of 1900.
~ Dhruv Khullar via The New Yorker

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