Pupillography is a method of recording pupillary movements (for example spontaneous movements and reactions to light, to darkness and to near and to distant vision). It permits exact measurements of these movements and furnishes an objective clinical criterion, a graph of the reactions.
The clinical significance of pupillography has its origin in three important facts:
In a physiologic fact, the extreme sensitivity of pupillary movements to both physical and psychologic stimuli. As far back as seventy-five years ago, the physiologist, Schiff, called the pupil the finest esthesiometer of the body.
In an anatomic fact, the wideness of the area over which pupillary tracts extend within the central nervous system and outside it, both in the sympathetic and in the parasympathetic system.
In a pathologic fact, the peculiar vulnerability of certain parts of the pupillary pathways to both specific and nonspecific damage.
On the surface, pupillary movements appear simply as the