Henry Wadhams Buel was born April 7, 1820. As the son of Samuel Buel, a doctor in Litchfield, Connecticut, and his wife Minerva, Henry was sent to the Litchfield Female Academy from 1829 until 1831 to study. He then graduated from Yale College in 1844 and received his M.D. from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City in 1848. He remained in the city as house surgeon in the New York Hospital until 1849, when he was appointed resident physician of Sanford Hall, a private insane asylum in Flushing, Long Island. After traveling in Europe, he returned to Litchfield in 1854 and established a sanitarium, the Spring Hill House for Nervous Invalids, in Litchfield in 1858. He was president of the Connecticut State Medical Society, the Litchfield Medical Society, and a member of the State Board of Charities. At the time of his death, he was president of the First National Bank of Litchfield. He first married Mary Ann Laidlaw of Brooklyn, New York in 1859. She died in 1864 and he then married her sister, Catherine Laidlaw in 1867. She died in 1882. He and his first wife had four children. Henry passed away on January 30,1893.

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