VISUAL FIELD DEFECTS IN PREGNANCY

INTRODUCTION In 1922, I read before the International Congress of Ophthalmology, held at Washington, a paper entitled "Bitemporal Contraction of the Visual Field in Pregnancy," with a report of the findings in the visual field in thirty-one cases of normal pregnancy with no ocular lesions, in twenty-two (70.97 per cent) of which there were changes in the limits of the visual field of the nature of bitemporal contraction, which I associated with the normal enlargement of the hypophysis in pregnancy, with a corresponding compression of the chiasm. In this paper I referred to the fact that similar defects had been reported by Bellinzona and Tridontani 1 in 1903, and by Forti 2 in 1910, A subsequent review of the literature by others and myself showed that Igersheimer, 3 in 1916, in an article on the detection of morbid processes in the visual pathways, referred to deformation of the visual