Alice was a remarkably talented and beautiful woman who, with her husband Henry Patterson graduated in the second class at the School of Osteopathy, newly founded in Kirksville, Missouri by Dr. Andrew Taylor Still, discoverer of Osteopathic Medicine. They both became staff members of the school and infirmary, Alice lecturing in anatomy, obstetrics and gynecology. She was also first assistant in maternity at the infirmary. She discovered a cure by osteopathy for gall bladder blockage, and one of her early patients was a six year old boy whose potentially fatal heart irregularity had been unsuccessfully treated elsewhere. Alice corrected the function and the patient lived for thirty three more years. In time over thirty-five of Alice's relatives became osteopathic physicians. After several years of stress in helping to operate the school and hospital, she and her husband, whose health was deteriorating, decided to start a practice and established themselves in summers at Mackinac Island, Michigan, and winters in St. Augustine, Florida. The father of Alice's six year old patient, Ohio Senator Joseph B. Foraker, was so grateful for her work that he persuaded Alice and Henry to set up a practice in Washington, D.C., promising his name as their reference. The couple followed his suggestion, and their practice quickly grew as the first one in the nation's capital. Alice maintained their successful practice after Henry's early death and until her own twenty-six years later. From a profile of Alice in an osteopathic journal: "Dr. Shibley [her second husband's surname] disappoints the old ideas of how a woman physician should look by being a really beautiful woman, of the Southern type, with delicate features that still indicate her strength, and dark brown hair which she dresses with the beautiful simplicity that greatly becomes her, and in the midst of a successful professional career she has remained the mother also, carefully rearing a daughter who is talented in musical and literary lines.....her patients and those who know her best love her best, for her sanity and good nature, her spontaneity and beauty, her quiet voice, as well as her skill." And in her memorial program: "Rarest charm...grace...physical poise...she needn't have had a back to her chair for she never used it....radiant eyes--speaking eyes, perfect brow and nose...expressive and sensitive hands."

Alice was a classmate at Missouri State Normal School, Kirksville, of Gen John J. Pershing. He was also a student of William Smith at the University of Nebraska, a relative of Alice's son-in-law, Paul R. Smith. Her address book: Recorder of Deeds, Jacksonville, OR, 480 acres timber land 25 Jun 1908 $9,290 deeded from George H. Shibley to Alice and recorded 8 Aug 1910 in repayment of a loan. Alice and Henry's papers, a three volume biography, "Alice - A Remembrance" and another, "Alice's Travels," both compiled by her grandson Quentin Cabell Smith, are in the Museum of Osteopathy in Kirksville.

Alice was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D. C., Section H, Lot 74, Site 57. Buried alongside her in subsequent years were her daughter Marian Lee (Patterson) Smith, her infant son Eugene Patterson, and Alice's sister and brother-in-law, Albert and Nettie (Smith) Boyles.