Mason’s skills included herbal medicine, which she had learned from other enslaved women in Mississippi and developed through decades of practice. This meant that she was not simply a birth attendant but a practitioner with a broader medical toolkit. She treated smallpox patients using herbal remedies, according to sources, in a period when epidemic disease was a regular feature of urban life. Her willingness to treat patients with infectious disease speaks to a combination of medical knowledge and something that might be called courage of a specific professional kind.
Her fluency in Spanish meant that she could serve Spanish-speaking patients who might have difficulty communicating with Anglo physicians. In a city where the Spanish-speaking population remained significant through the 1850s and 1860s, this was a genuine competitive advantage in professional terms, and also a form of service to a community that might otherwise have had limited access to English-speaking medical practitioners.
She worked within a relationship with Dr. Griffin that is not fully specified in the surviving record. Whether she was employed by him in some formal sense, whether she operated independently with his referrals, or whether the relationship was more informal is not established by available sources. What is clear is that Griffin’s introduction gave her professional credibility in the Anglo community and that she built from that foundation a practice serving the broader city.
She could not receive formal medical credentials, as the licensing systems of the period did not create pathways for a woman like her. She practiced entirely on the basis of reputation, demonstrated skill, and trust built through direct experience. Her illiteracy meant she could not study medical texts or correspond in writing with other practitioners. What she knew, she had learned by doing and by learning from other practitioners, and she transmitted that knowledge through practice.