Like other young people at that time, Nadezhda was fond of reading, enjoyed the works of Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov[1] and befriended revolutionary democrats.

She was allowed by Ivan Sechenov and Sergey Botkin to attend classes at the Imperial Military Medical Academy with Mariia Obrucheva (Bokov), another young woman with revolutionary sympathies who had met Suslova in school.

In 1865, after women were officially banned from universities, she moved to Switzerland, partially influenced by the arrest of her siblings and Bokov and her husband for political activities.

For her dissertation, she researched the muscular reflexes of frogs and their relationship to the function of lymph hearts at Graz Medical University in Sechenov's lab.

[1][4][5] Suslova was the first Russian woman to be awarded a Doctor of Medicine degree, which was conferred after having to defend her research and education in front of a large audience and the medical school faculty.

The next year, Friedrich Erismann moved to St. Petersburg and the couple collaborated in medical practice and researching public health issues affecting the city's slums.