Life & Mortality Quote by Agnes Repplier

Repplier’s line lands like a parlor-room jab at the modern age’s favorite superstition: that “progress” is a moral upgrade, not just a technical one. By separating “the diseases of the present” from “the diseases of the past,” she refuses the comforting idea that history repeats in neat cycles. Illness, in her framing, mutates with society. The only continuity is the blunt, egalitarian outcome: “save that we die of them.” It’s comedy with a hard edge, the kind that punctures both nostalgia and tech-utopianism in a single breath.

The intent isn’t medical so much as cultural. Repplier was writing in an era when industrialization, urban crowding, new diagnostics, and new anxieties were reshaping what people feared. Public health reforms and germ theory promised control, even mastery. Her sentence counters that swagger. Yes, we’ve changed the names, the mechanisms, the charts; our era invents fresh ways to break down, often in lockstep with its own innovations and pressures. The modern world manufactures its own pathologies, and then congratulates itself for recognizing them.

Subtext: don’t confuse novelty with superiority. Past generations weren’t quaintly “unhealthy”; they were exposed to different risks, framed by different narratives. Today’s diseases may be cleaner, clinical, managerial - but they still end in the same existential audit. Repplier’s final clause is the trapdoor: mortality is the one tradition modernity can’t disrupt, only rebrand.