Boyle's only formal qualification was that of a "created" Doctor of Medicine from Oxford (8 Sept. 1665), a degree he had not actually read for. Nevertheless, states Fulton, "in this little-studied volume on Specifick Medicines he reveals clinical insight into various disease entities such as nephritis, the failing heart, local gangrene, renal stone, &c." The Advertisement to the work explains how the author had written it while vacationing in a village without access to a library or even to his own book (Usefulness of Experimental Philosophy) published "seventeen or eighteen years before," and he therefore apologises for what repetitions have crept in.