[2] She lived in Brooklyn, New York in 1870 with her mother, her brother Rear Admiral George Watson Sumner, and his first wife Henrietta Eliza.
Nettie J. Sumner and Annie Elmira Rice enrolled in Georgetown's Medical Department, beginning school in the fall of 1880.
[8] She also published an article on "A puzzling case of uterine disease" in 1882, presented to the WMCP alumni association in Philadelphia in 1886.
[9] The winter and spring before starting medical school at Georgetown University, Sumner wrote a letter to Alexander Graham Bell documenting how Sumner and Rice both volunteered in his laboratory at 1325 L Street NW to listen to a song and his voice on the new telephone (patented four years earlier).
[16] Male doctors and medical students began joining the staff, with residency opportunities throughout the city in short supply, and Sumner forced to succumb to pressures from her powerful male-dominated consulting board.