Somatic school
Somatic school may refer to those in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who argued for a biological etiology of insanity; or it may refer to a group of nineteenth-century German psychiatrists, including Carl [Wigand Maximilian Jacobi|Carl Jacobi], Christian Friedrich Nasse and Carl Friedrich Flemming, who taught that insanity is a symptom of biological diseases located outside the brain, particularly diseases of the abdominal and thoracic viscera. This latter German school opposed the "physiological school" represented in Germany by Wilhelm Roser, Wilhelm Griesinger and Carl Wunderlich, who insisted on there being a brain lesion underlying every case of insanity, even if in some instances that lesion is the product of a pre-existing, extra-cerebral biological illness and the psychical school of Johann [Christian August Heinroth|Johann Heinroth] and others, who asserted that all insanity is the product of moral or psychological weakness and rejected any notion of a physical pathological cause.