Her parents, John and Margaret Reynolds, had migrated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from Quebec, Canada, three years earlier.

One cousin, Walter H. Neilson, the first dean of the medical school at Marquette University, discouraged her, indicating that medicine was an inappropriate career for women.

In 1898, thirty-year-old Reynolds nevertheless enrolled in the Woman's Hospital Medical College of Chicago; she completed her MD in 1901.

She died October 31, 1961, at the age of 93, and is buried in the Little Brown Church cemetery in Bear Valley.

[7] Her medical apparatus, including her bag and scalpels, were donated to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.