The exact functioning of the human brain often remains a big mystery to medical science. Willem Noyons intended to portray this realization in this medal.

The top has been cast from a skull. The detailed line drawing of the seam that runs between the bones - as personal as a fingerprint - and a small hump-shaped concrescence, remind us that we are dealing with a fragment of an individual who once really existed. This ties in with a wonderful quote from the American brain surgeon Harvey Williams Cushing (1869-1939): “A physician is obligated to consider more than a diseased organ, more even than the whole man - he must view the man in his world”. One who turns the medal around, faces a direct confrontation with the great enigma: the brain leaving a pitch-black void in patinated bronze.