First illustration of the homunculus by Hortense Douglas for Dr. Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute, 1941

The homunculus is a distorted human figure mapped onto a visualization of a brain to illustrates how the brain’s cortex processes sensory information for different body parts. The image grew from Penfield’s brain mapping research of the 1930s–50s and became an icon of neuroscience. This is the first iteration of the homunculus that Hortense Douglas created while working with Penfield.