Maria Civit was a client of the pharmacist and bookseller Doctor Gassol, who from time to time would rent her one of his two hundred volumes on various topics: the lives of saints, prayer books, tractates on arithmetic and medicine, herbalism and pharmaceutics, books of spells, moral novels, books on history... This auto-didactic cultural education was of great use to Maria and her spouse, both in terms of the economic management of their estate as well as the public image of the military leader of the Mossos. Civit's role as a healer was critical: among the documents of the Veciana family, many notes on remedies can be found in Civit's handwriting, marrying the therapeutic recipes from the tractates she read with popular remedies from oral tradition. During the War of Spanish Succession, his persecution of anti-Bourbon rebel groups and gangs of bandits left the Mayor of Valls badly wounded on several occasions; he was cured by his wife with preparations that she had preserved in writing.