David Veit

David Veit was a medical doctor and writer from the Kingdom of Prussia, born in Breslau in 1771 and died in 1814. His father Juda Veit was a banker, and his brother Simon Veit married a daughter of Moses Mendelssohn, which made David the uncle of the painters Johannes and Philipp Veit. As a student he began a correspondence with Rahel Varnhagen von Ense in which he also described meeting the poet Goethe. He travelled with Abraham Mendelssohn to study in Paris and in 1799 moved to Hamburg, where he worked as a doctor and writer and moved among figures such as Johann Albert Heinrich Reimarus, Friedrich Christoph Perthes, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. His medical writings include a 1797 Halle treatise on the energy and sympathy of the organs of the human body and a 1794 work on chemical affinity for naturalists, chemists, physicians and apothecaries.