Jannik Petersen Bjerrum, Date of Birth, Date of Death
TweetJannik Petersen Bjerrum
Danish ophthalmologist
Date of Birth: 
About Jannik Petersen Bjerrum
- Jannik Petersen Bjerrum (26 December 1851 – 2 July 1920) was a Danish ophthalmologist who was a native of Skærbæk, a town in the southernmost part of Jutland.
- In 1864 Skærbæk became part of Germany due to consequences of the Second Schleswig War.
- In 1876 he received his medical doctorate from the University of Copenhagen, and in 1879 became an assistant to Edmund Hansen Grut (1831-1907) at the Havnegade eye clinic.
- After Grut's retirement in 1896, he became director of the clinic, as well as being the second professor of ophthalmology at the University of Copenhagen, a position he would maintain until his retirement in 1910. Bjerrum made contributions regarding pathogenetic research of glaucoma, and performed extensive investigations involving campimetry.
- He was interested in the correlation between visual perception of form and the resolving power in localized regions of the retina.
- He was particularly focused on the subtleties of the central 30° of the visual field rather than the standard perimetry tests that many of his contemporaries favored.
- As a result of his campimetric tests he discovered a small glaucomatous scotoma that was to become known as a "Bjerrum scotoma", which is a visual field defect that goes by several other names, such as "sickle scotoma", "arcuate scotoma" or "scimitar scotoma".
- Other eponyms named after Bjerrum include: Bjerrum tangent screen: Screen used to assess the central 30° of the visual field. Bjerrum's area: An arcuate region that extends above and below the blind spot to between 10° and 20° of fixation point.After Bjerrum's retirement in 1910, his work in campimetry was continued by his assistant, Henning Rønne (1878-1947). Jannik Petersen Bjerrum was the father of the chemist Niels Bjerrum and the brother of physicist Kirstine Meyer.
Read more at Wikipedia