Her uncle, Dr. Hiram Corson, initially opposed her desire to become a doctor, but eventually agreed to tutor her and later allowed her to study in his office before applying to medical school.

[1] In 1852, she married Dr. Lester Dolley, a professor at Central Medical College, and returned to Rochester where they ran a private practice together until her husband's death in 1872.

[2] Dolley temporarily worked as a professor of obstetrics from 1873 to 1874 at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, before returning to private practice in Rochester.

[1] She made efforts to help women get hired in hospital positions that they could not previously obtain, knowing how much she had benefited from the experiences of her internship.

[1] She had a reputation in the community of being a skilled doctor, even among her male colleagues, which was unusual of a woman physician in the nineteenth-century United States.