it may not have been unusual to be self taught in medicine but i think the reader deserves an explanation of how one becomes a doctor without going through any process of certification if this was common practice in those days as well to set up practice as a physician without any formal credentials the article needs to say so since a doctorate is an academic degree bestowed by an institution of higher learning if as you say the source uses exactly this wording then it would be best enclosed in quotation marks to show the wording is not a careless interpretation by a wikipedia editor