Being, alongside Oribasius and Rufus, one of the very few Graeco Hellenistic medical authors to have been translated into Latin in Late Antiquity (with MS copies dated from ca. AD 800), sixth-century Trallian doctor Alexander's Θεραρευτικά can be reckoned among the most important auctoritates both in the history of Byzantine medicine (from Paulus of Aegina down to Myrepsus and Actuarius) and in the Latin West, where it was quoted all through the mediaeval period, some excerpts therefrom appearing even in an Old English Leechbook dated before AD 900.
As to the textual transmission of his oeuvre and after Puschmann's critical edition of the Greek texts, the attention has lately been drawn to the Latin tradition of the Theraupeutica (Langslow 2006, a set of prolegomena to his forthcoming critical edition) but, in spite of its being duly mentioned or cursorily surveyed by scholars dealing with medical matters (Puschmann, Bloch, Sezgin, Ullmann), the Arabic transmission of Alexander of Tralles works still awaits for a comprehensive research. The only witness we have to reconstruct this tradition being the less than two scores of quotations to be found since the earliest eastern compilations, the present contribution is submitted as a prefatory sketch of such a study, modelled after Pormann's paradigmatic study of the oriental tradition of Paulus of Aegina's Pragmateia. The analysis of the Arabic tradition (which quotes several titles besides Alexander's therapeutical handbook [kunnāš]) may help shedding some light on the ascription to Alexander in the Greek and Latin traditions of several minor texts more or less suspected of pseudoepigraphy. As a necessary complement to the strictly philological section, we would like to advance as well some preliminary reflections on the different interests aroused in the Arabic Islamic medical tradition by Alexander's eminently practical approach to medicine. Although fully inscribed in the classical Hippocratic-Galenic tradition, his works are marked by eclecticism, originality and witty criticism with respect both to his predecessors and contemporaries. Among Arabic-writing physicians, his recurrent resort to his own long-life qualified experience (πεῖρα) did not pass unnoticed by the taǧribah-focused empiricists, neither did the role played therein by natural remedies (φυσικά, including amulets and incantations), an aspect dearly favoured by the Arabic ḫawāṣṣ literature with a much more pronounced leaning towards magic.