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Illustration by Hortense Douglas for Dr. Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute, 1948

Black and white, simplified outline of a brain. On the inside of the shape of the brain, dashes and handprinted labels throughout. Line drawings of exaggerated human body parts hug the outside of the brain shape.

Wilder Penfield Fonds, Osler Medical Library, McGill University

Douglas’ finalized homunculus drawing, signed 1948, often re-produced and not accurately attributed to Douglas. This distorted human figure, mapped onto a visualization of a brain, 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.