Few medical doctors have been as lauded—and loathed—as James Marion Sims.

Credited as the “father of modern gynecology,” Sims developed pioneering tools and surgical techniques related to women’s reproductive health. In 1876, he was named president of the American Medical Association, and in 1880, he became president of the American Gynecological Society, an organization he helped found. The 19th-century physician has been lionized with a half-dozen statues around the country.

But because Sims’ research was conducted on enslaved Black women without anesthesia, medical ethicists, historians and others say his use of enslaved Black bodies as medical test subjects falls into a long, ethically bereft history that includes the Tuskegee syphilis experiment and Henrietta Lacks. Critics say Sims cared more about the experiments than in providing therapeutic treatment, and that he caused untold suffering by operating under the racist notion that Black people did not feel pain.

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In the 1850s, Sims moved to New York and opened the first-ever Woman’s Hospital, where he continued testing controversial medical treatments on his patients. When any of Sims’s patients died, the blame, according to him, lay squarely with “the sloth and ignorance of their mothers and the Black midwives who attended them.” He did not believe anything was wrong with his methods.