Markus Herz

Markus Herz (1747 to 1803) was a German Jewish physician and lecturer on philosophy. Born in Berlin to very poor parents and first destined for commerce, he went to Königsberg, studied under Immanuel Kant and acted as respondent at Kant's inaugural dissertation in 1770. He then studied medicine at Halle, became a Doctor of Medicine in 1774 and set up in Berlin as physician at the Jewish hospital. From 1777 he gave well attended public lectures on medicine and philosophy, and his house became a meeting place for Berlin intellectuals. He wrote Briefe an Aerzte, Grundriss der Medizinischen Wissenschaften and an important study of vertigo, and he strongly condemned compulsory vaccination in an open letter of 1801.