Jeannette Judson Sumner

Sumner was born in Constantine, Michigan to Hester Ann Welling and Watson Sumner, MD. Her father was the town physician, and an "overseer of the poor" through his civic work.^[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.^[3] The Sumners were a prominent family, and George was a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, a veteran of the American Civil War and the Spanish American War, and a member of the Sons of the American Revolution.^[4] By 1880, Nettie Sumner lived with them and several nieces and nephews in Washington, DC at the time of her enrollment at Georgetown.

Nettie J. Sumner and Annie Elmira Rice enrolled in Georgetown's Medical Department, beginning school in the fall of 1880.^[5][6] In 1881, both students transferred to the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP), where they completed their medical degrees in 1883.^[7] Sumner's thesis at WMCP was on Hystero-trachelorrhaphy.^[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).^[10] It reads as though he requested it from her, and the full, handwritten copy is available at the Library of Congress. That season she also worked at Bell's Volta Bureau office in Georgetown, Washington, DC alongside engineer and inventor Sumner Tainter, one of Bell's close collaborators, transcribing his experiments and explaining complex concepts.^[11]