[3][1] Sarah attended the Albany Normal School and the Emma Willard Seminary at Troy, where she learned to teach which was her career for several years.

[4] Her colleagues and mentors, Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell and Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi, shared interests of hers, including pediatrics and neurology.

[1] Along with Dr. Jacobi, she helped to found the New York Post Graduate Medical School and Hospital, which continued physician education through lectures.

[4][1] McNutt worked for 11 years in the children's department of the Women's Medical College of the New York Infirmary hospital.

[4][7] At her induction meeting, she presented a paper titled "Provisional Report of a Case of Double Infantile Spastic Hemiplegia.

[9] McNutt's work on what we now call cerebral palsy was cited in William Gowers' seminal textbook Manual of Diseases of the Nervous System.

MacDonald Critchley, in his biography of Gowers, wrote that he was not a "rabid misogynist" but thought McNutt had contributed more than any other women at that time.