It's an innocuous looking picture, except when you are told that the man on the right in black coat is James Marion Sims, 'the father of modern gynecology' and the girl looking at him from the table is Anarcha Westcott, an enslaved 17-year-old who endured as many as 30 experimental surgeries without anaesthetic or her consent for the benefit of science.

While Sims went on to be lionized around the country with half-dozen statues, very few even know who Westcott was.

Sims, an Alabama surgeon carried out a series of experimental operations on black slave women between 1845 and 1849 to develop 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.

Yet his achievements have been clouded by his dubious medical ethics. Critics argue that Jims manipulated the institution of slavery to perform ethically unacceptable human experiments on powerless, unconsenting women.

Although enslaved African American women certainly represented a “vulnerable population” in the 19th century American South, evidence suggests that Sims's original patients were willing participants in his surgical attempts to cure their affliction—a condition for which no other viable therapy existed at that time.