GP was likely referring to J. Marion Sims, who tested operations on enslaved women who couldn’t meaningfully consent (in an era when there was little or no anesthesia), with some women being operated on over a dozen times, performed ovary removal and clitorectomies on women at the behest of their fathers or husbands to treat “hysteria”, and was a Confederate sympathizer who spent the war over in Europe raising money and seeking diplomatic recognition for it.

He also developed several important surgical techniques and operated on cancer patients at a time when that was considered an absolute waste of time and resources, and that latter thing caused him to lose his position at the hospital he had founded, after which he started the first cancer hospital.