The following was taken from the Historical and Biographical Record of the Class of 1841 in Yale University:
Henry Sargent, one of the eight children of Col. Henry and Elizabeth (Denny) Sargent, was a native and resident of Leicester, Mass., born November 7, 1821.
His father was a successful business man, and held many civil and military offices. He was a member of the Constitutional Convention in 1821. He died in 1829, but his wife survived till May 6, 1862. His paternal grandparents were Joseph and Mary (Denny) Sargent, both natives of Leicester, and his great-grandparents were Joseph and Hannah (Whittemore) Sargent, of that town. Joseph Sargent, Sr., removed from Malden to Leicester in 1747, and his ancestor, William Sargent, came from England in 1638. His first ancestor in this country on his mother’s side was Daniel Denny, who came from Combs, Suffolk County, England, in 1715, and was one of the first settlers of Leicester in 1717. InCombs the family have been traced back to 1439. His Cousin, J. B. Sargent, the present Mayor of New Haven (1892), was an intimate friend in boyhood. His sister Mary is the wife of Rev. Isaac R Worcester of West Roxbury, Mass., and his sister Elizabeth married Dr. Alfred Lambert (Yale, 1843), a physician of Springfield, Mass., who died in 1885. Mrs. Lambert died December 28, 1891.
He prepared for college at Phillips Academy, Exeter NH. He attended medical lectures in Boston in 1841-2, in Philadelphia in 1842-3 and again in Boston in 1843-4. His life was endangered in the spring of 1844 by a wound received in dissecting. At our meeting in August 1844 he reported himself to be going into the Massachusetts General Hospital as House Physician, expecting to remain there a year; but on recovering from his disablement of several months from his wound, he went to Paris to study medicine. He spent eighteen months there, and six months in traveling on the Rhine, and in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Great Britain and Ireland. He received his MD from Harvard in 1847, and settled as a physician in Worcester MA. In July 1851 he sailed for Europe on accound of ill health, and was absent till the next spring, when he resumed the practice of his profession in Worcester. He found himself, however, after repeated attempts, unable to bear the burden of general practice, as his constitution never recovered from the effects of his dissection wound. In September 1853 he sailed a third time for Europe, with the design of qualifying himself especially as an oculist and aurist. Returning to Worcester, he practiced mostly in these departments from April 1854 to November 1857. He was then brought down by an attack of pleurisy, which was soon accompanied with symptoms of Bright's disease, and under this, with the dropsical effusions accompanying it, he died in Worcester, April 27, 1858.
He married Miss Catherine Dean Whitney of Cambridge Mass. April 30, 1849. She was a sister of the wife of his brother, Dr Joseph Sargent, daughter of Asa and Mary (Hammond) Whitney, and a descendant of John Whitney, who came from London to Watertown MA in 1635. "Four months only,: said he, in 1851, "were we allowed to live with each other; at the end of this time she was taken from me, after an illness of ten days, which she contracted while watching anxiously over her mother, who died of the same disease (dysentery) a fortnight previous. Thus from the happiest man living (as I thought), I was made the most unhappy; my home was broken up, and my heart made desolate. I have been a lone man since, though living in the midst of the kindest and best of friends."
He was laid by the side of his wife at Mount Auburn, on the anniversary of their marriage.
"He had looked forward," said his brother, Joseph Sargent, MD of Worcester, "to this second joining together almost as longingly as he did to the first, and had given me particular directions as to the housrs and ceremonies, making them almost exactly the repetition of those which marked the funeral of his wife...My brother was a Christian. His religion was in his life, and not on his lips. He was no sectarian, and, though very decided in his own opinions, had a great respect for the sincere convictions of others. He had no confidence in spasmodic piety, but loved his God always, and tried to love his neighbor as himself...
"I never knew a physician to so make the sufferings of his patient his own, and I never knew patients so attached to their physician as his were to him. His five months' illness was a procession of kind attentioins from people of all classes. His sick-room in midwinter was always beautiful with flowers, never a day passing without some bouquet; and kind messages more beautiful and fragrant than flowers were sent in to the last hour of his life. Women begged with tears to be allowed to see him, and men vied with each other in their desire to serve him."
Our Classmate Peters paid him the following tribute in the Class Book of 1862: "As a Classmate, there is none to whom his name brings other than pleasant memories. His few intimate friends will recognize in his manhood the fuller development of those traits of character which marked him during his college course. We see the well-remembered conscientiousness of our former companion in the thoroughness of his preparation for professional life; the quiet determination of those earlier years in his slowness to yield to the necessity of quitting his practice; in the constancy of his affection, the growth of that steadfastness which, when he was with us, gave such value to his friendship."
A brother physician said of him: "He had a genuine love for the study of medicine, and practiced it with the spirit of true benevolence. The satisfaction of feeling that he had alleviated human suffering, or prolonged human life, was to him a greater reward than any pecuniary compensation...He never disparaged the reputation of his medical brethren, or sought to advance himself at the expense of others. The performance of offices of love and kindness was to him a genuine and never-failing source of happiness. In 'seeking others' good' he found his own."