Dudley Allen Sargent was a 30-year-old physician with a revolutionary vision when Harvard University recruited him in 1880. The university’s president wanted him to manage its new Hemenway Gymnasium and teach physical training to the students—a pursuit traditionally limited to the school’s athletes. Members of the faculty and board of overseers opposed the move: exercise, in their minds, wasn’t a serious academic discipline.

Sargent, however, took it very seriously. He considered physical activity to be the means for maintaining health and improving functional capacity for anyone, with or without a disability, and he brought a scientific rigor to his work. It was an approach to preventative and rehabilitative care he’d hit upon during medical school and would carry throughout his life. The Harvard appointment would give him a platform to share, with an international audience, his application of anatomy and physiology to physical fitness. And to found what would eventually become BU College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College. “The crying need of the hour is to get educators to recognize the fundamental importance of all forms of physical training and bodily activity,” he wrote in 1906.

Sargent was more than an innovative educator and researcher, however. He was also ahead of his time in encouraging the participation of all, regardless of ability, gender, or race.

“The most important part of Dudley Allen Sargent’s legacy is his philosophy of inclusion, his understanding that there’s a place for everyone to participate to their full ability and their full ambition,” says Sargent College’s dean, Christopher Moore. “It was incredibly sophisticated. He was ahead of his time.”

Almost a century after his death, the college bearing his name represents a realization of his vision that he couldn’t possibly have imagined. But from the lab to the classroom to the culture, Sargent College continues to follow its founder’s lead.

A NEW APPROACH

Just before joining Harvard, Sargent had opened his own gym in New York City, bringing his ideas to life by helping men, women, and children improve their health through physical activity. Sargent’s version of a gym, however, was as much a medical practice and research lab as it was a fitness center. He collected a wealth of data, measuring his clients’ bodies and movements, then prescribing exercises based on any weaknesses he detected. He also visited clinics around the city to learn how people with different disabilities and illnesses responded to physical training.

While his medical school peers opened traditional physician offices, consulting with patients and prescribing drugs, Sargent remained steadfast in his pursuit of a new approach. “I had seen a gleam that I must follow, and that gleam was preventive medicine,” he wrote. He told a reporter for the New York Daily Herald, “I assume the same responsibility for my pupils that the physician does for his patients.” The appointment at Harvard gave Sargent a far greater reach.

“Colleges, universities, schools, hospitals, medical clinics, and other public and private institutions throughout the country and in foreign lands called upon him to provide instructors and practitioners trained in his theories and methods,” wrote George Makechnie (Wheelock’29,’31, Hon.’79), dean of Sargent College between 1945 and 1972 and author of a history of the school, Optimal Health: The Quest. Sargent pushed his ideas on all fronts—as teacher, trainer, researcher, writer, and even inventor. Training apparatus of his own creation soon filled Hemenway Gymnasium.

Despite his work at Harvard, it was an off-campus project that solidified Sargent’s legacy. One year after arriving in Cambridge, Mass., he received a request from the Harvard Annex (the predecessor to Radcliffe College) to offer courses preparing women to teach physical education. Sargent leased a space and, in 1881, welcomed six students into the inaugural class at his Normal School of Physical Training (a normal school, in the 1800s, was a school that trained teachers).

Enrollment in the school’s two-year course of study grew steadily. By the time of Sargent’s death, in 1924, obituaries suggest that his work was finally being recognized. The American Physical Education Review published a series of tributes, with peers calling him “the dean of physical education” and crediting him with undertaking “one of the first endeavors to turn physical training into scientific paths.” The Boston Globe wrote that Sargent’s students had spread his teachings across North America and Europe. A broader allied health movement was also beginning to foster specialized and diversified disciplines like physical therapy with similar goals. With that came the demand for corresponding academic credentials.

When Ledyard Sargent took over the school from his father in 1921, one of his first major decisions was to partner with Boston University so his students could earn a Bachelor of Science in education. Then, in 1929, Ledyard took an additional step to ensure his father’s legacy, giving the entire school, with its 40-person faculty and 400 students, to BU, where it initially joined its school of education.

A PERMANENT HOME

Five years later, recognizing that the school was growing and evolving, BU established Boston University Sargent College of Physical Education.

When the college added a dedicated physical therapy program in 1931, it marked the start of a decades-long period of growth and expansion that further shaped and defined the modern Sargent College. Future additions included the physical therapy clinic, which now resides in BU’s Ryan Center for Sports Medicine, in 1959, and an occupational therapy program in 1962. The 1970s brought new programs in nutrition, speech pathology, and audiology, as well as the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation. In recent years, the college has established three named professorships, renovated the Ryan Center, and attracted millions in research funding—faculty brought in $18 million in the past year alone. Today, the college is recognized as one of the best in the country: U.S. News & World Report recently named the occupational therapy program as the top in the nation, and also ranked speech-language pathology and physical therapy among the best.

Moore says D. A. Sargent’s revolutionary vision laid the foundation for all the work happening at the college today. In some cases, he says, it took the world decades to catch up to his ideas. The World Health Organization, for example, adopted the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health—a model that expanded the treatment of impairments beyond a medical approach to addressing an individual’s ability to participate in activities of daily living—in 2001, more than a century after Sargent pioneered that philosophy. His individualized method of patient care and use of physical training to enhance participation in activities of daily living are considered direct predecessors to physical therapy and occupational therapy.

“We are realizing his vision,” says Moore. “D. A. Sargent was human-centered. He was data-driven. He helped people achieve what they wanted to achieve by whatever means were available. That interactive collaboration between the healthcare provider and the patient was a revolutionary idea.” The college’s culture also comes from its founder’s influence. A small, close-knit school for decades before joining a large research university, Sargent strives to maintain some of that identity today. “A human centeredness is our real identifying characteristic,” Moore says. “All of our programs are focused singularly on improving the human condition.” Students come to Sargent for a very particular experience, but they often don’t know how it came to be that way. Moore hopes that can change: “D. A. Sargent’s story really shrinks history. It’s the continuous thread through the college’s history.”

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