The Historical Roots of the Visual Examination

Abstract

The history of the visual examination is discussed in five parts. The history of visual acuity is followed from the minimum separable of Persian scientists to the 19th-century charts. Events in the history of the examination of the pupil include the late discovery of the significance of anisocoria in trauma, the description of the pupillary light reflex, the midbrain nucleus responsible for it, and the discovery of the neuroanatomic basis of pupillary abnormalities. Attempts to look into the eyeball date from the 17th century and are followed up to the discovery of the ophthalmoscope (1851). The evolution of the visual field examination is described from the first observations of hemianopia in the Hippocratic Corpus, to the present day visual field examination. Important landmarks in the history of central disorders of visual integration include "mind blindness" and the theories on aphasia that formed the basis for the study of disorders of central integration.

Psychic Blindness or Visual Agnosia: Early Descriptions of a Nervous Disorder

“…1 A disorder of this kind was first mentioned by Wigan (1844Wigan ( /2006. 2 In other early reports, similar defects were described (Koehler, 2002). The present article concentrates upon research that provided the basis for the definition of visual agnosia as a syndrome sui generis.…”

Guest Editorial Essay

“…They adopted the alternative approach of viewing stimuli of variable size at a fixed or short range of distances. Text was a convenient stimulus and the ability to read it was employed as a rough index of acuity (Koehler 2002;Runge 2000). In the nineteenth (1891), and he is placed in a diagram of the lens taken from his book on anomalies of refraction (Donders 1864).…”