At this time the Popes were at Avignon, not far distant from Montpelier. From them Guy received every encouragement in his scientific work. He insisted that no one could practice surgery with any hope of success unless he devoted himself to careful dissection of the human body. If we were to believe some of the things that have been said with regard to the Popes forbidding dissection, this should have been enough to keep the French surgeon from the favor of the Popes, but it did not. On the contrary, he was the intimate friend and consultant medical attendant of two of the Avignon Popes, and was the chamberlain to one of them. The good influence of Chauliac on the minds of the Popes is reflected in their interest in the medical department of the University of Montpelier. About this time Pope Urban VI. founded the College of Twelve Physicians at Montpelier. He was an alumnus of the university, and had been appealed to to enlarge the opportunities of his Alma Mater. He did so in the manner just related. One of the Papal Physicians of the Avignon times was unfortunate. This was the ill-fated Cecco di Ascolo, who was distinguished as a poet and a philosopher as well as a physician. But for his sad end, one might be tempted to say, that he had so many irons in the fire {212} that it was scarce to be wondered at that he suffered the fate of many another tender of too many irons, and eventually got his fingers burnt. He was body physician of Pope John XXII. during a good part of the long pontificate of that strenuous old man, who became Pope when over seventy, lived to be ninety, yet accomplished important work in every year of his career. After leaving Avignon Cecco went to Italy and became the Professor of Astrology at Bologna. The term astrology had none of the unfortunate or derisory signification that it has at the present time. It was, as the etymology of the word implies, the science of the stars, though it was cultivated with due reference to the influence of these heavenly bodies on human fate and human constitutions. Hence a physician's interest in it. This continued to be a characteristic of astrology down to the time of Tycho-Brahe, the Danish astronomer, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Cecco and another distinguished physician of the time, Dino de Garbo, became involved in a public controversy, as the result of which Cecco was denounced to the public authorities as undermining the basis of government and virtually teaching anarchy, though it was called heresy, and as a result of the bitter feud he suffered the penalty of death by fire.