The so-called Second Part of monastic writings composed by the 7th century East Syriac author Isaac of Nineveh contains a paraphrased citation from the famous beginning of Hippocrates’ Aphorismoi. The article tackles the issue of Isaac’s awareness of the aphorism and tries to reconstruct its interpretation by the author. Though medical texts were available in the East Syriac monastic milieu of that time, it is not likely that Isaac had at his disposal a complete Syriac translation of the Aphorismoi, but rather his acquaintance with the aphorism was mediated by a source that would more likely have been read in monastic context. A good example offers the treatise De anima by the early 5th century monastic author John the Solitary, whose works exercised profound influence upon the entire East Syriac monastic tradition, including Isaac of Nineveh. The given case of a monastic interpretation of a piece of secular wisdom is an illustrative showcase that provides an opportunity to observe a particular sensitivity of the Syriac tradition to medicine and its power to embed it within an appropriate context.

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A little-known thirteenth-century manuscript preserved in Damascus contains by far the largest Syriac medical work that has survived till today. Despite the missing beginning, a preliminary study of the text allows us to argue that it is the medical handbook (entitled Kunnāšā) of Īšōʿ bar ʿAlī, a ninth-century physician and student of Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq. The seven books of the handbook appear to follow the model of Paul of Aegina’s Pragmateia both in composition and content. The actual significance of the handbook in the history of Syriac and Arabic medicine is yet to be assessed, but there can be no doubt that it will be a pivotal source that illustrates the development of Syriac medicine during a period of four centuries at the moment when it was being translated to lay the foundations of the nascent medical tradition in Arabic.