Elaboration of the Visual Pathways from the Study of War Related Cranial Injuries: The Period from the Russo Japanese War to World War I.
As a result of the wars in the early 20th century, elaboration of the visual pathways was greatly facilitated by the meticulous study of visual defects in soldiers who had suffered focal injuries to the visual cortex. Using relatively crude techniques, often under difficult wartime circumstances, investigators successfully mapped key features of the visual pathways. Studies during the Russo Japanese War (1904 1905) by Tatsuji Inouye (1881 1976) and during World War I by Gordon Holmes (1876 1965) William Lister (1868 1944) and others produced increasingly refined retinotopic maps of the primary visual cortex, which were later supported and refined by studies during and after World War II. Studies by George Riddoch (1888 1947) during World War I also demonstrated that some patients could still perceive motion despite blindness caused by damage to their visual cortex and helped to establish the concept of functional partitioning of visual processes in the occipital cortex.
Frontiers of neurology and neuroscience