[1] Dock was an assistant superintendent at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing under Isabel Hampton Robb.

She and her siblings were financially independent due to an income from a land that their parents inherited, which allowed her greater choice in her career path.

[3][4] In 1884, Dock enrolled at the Bellevue Hospital School of Nursing in New York and graduated in 1886, working there afterwards as a night supervisor.

[5] Previously at Bellevue, Dock herself experienced the problems nursing students faced when studying drugs.

[6][4] In 1890, Dock was appointed to Johns Hopkins School of Nursing as the assistant superintendent under Isabel Hampton Robb, with whom she remained lifelong friends.

[3] When Dock left Hopkins in 1896 at age 38, she moved to the Henry Street Settlement in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and worked as a visiting nurse for twenty years.

[3] In 1910, Dock published Hygiene and Morality, in which she opposed state-regulated prostitution and supported treatment of venereal disease.

In 1896, Dock moved to the Henry Street Settlement in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where her friend Lillian Wald resided.

[6] Dock moved to Washington, D.C. in 1917 and joined the advisory council of the National Woman's Party, led by Alice Paul.

[4] Her public health and gender equality work intersected in her support for the treatment of venereal disease (which she discussed in her book Hygiene and Morality) and her emphasis on widespread access to information about birth control in her speech at the New York Academy of Medicine.