His sorrows had only made him incline the more towards the griefs of others. The memory of the children he had lost, the mournings he had witnessed, caused him to passionately desire that there might be fewer empty places in desolate homes, and that this might be due to the application of methods derived from his discoveries, of which he foresaw the immense bearings on pathology. Beyond this, patriotism being for him a ruling motive, he thought of the thousands of young men lost to France every year, victims of the tiny germs of murderous diseases. And, at the thought of epidemics and the heavy tax they levy on the whole world, his compassion extended itself to all human suffering. He regretted that he was not a medical man, fancying that it might have facilitated his task. It was true that, at every incursion on the domain of Medicine, he was looked upon as a chemist--a _chymiaster_, some said--who was poaching on the preserves of others. The distrust felt by the physicians in the chemists was of a long standing. In the _Traité de Thérapeutique_, published in 1855 by Trousseau and Pidoux, we find this passage: “When a chemist has seen the chemical conditions of respiration, of digestion, or of the action of some drug, he thinks he has given the theory of those functions and phenomena. It is ever the same delusion which chemists will never get over. We must make up our minds to that, but let us beware of trying to profit by the precious researches which they would probably never undertake if they were not stimulated by the ambition of explaining what is outside their range.” Pidoux never retrenched anything from two other phrases, also to be found in that same treatise: “Between a physiological fact and a pathological fact there is the same difference as between a mineral and a vegetable”; and: “It is not within the power of physiology to explain the simplest pathological affection.” Trousseau, on the other hand, was endowed with the far-seeing intelligence of a great physician attentive to the progress of science. He was greatly interested in Pasteur’s work, and fully appreciated the possibilities opened by each of his discoveries.