Sophie McBain

3 weeks ago | theguardian.com | Sophie McBain

As the novelist Yiyun Li often observes, there is no good way to state the facts of her life and yet they are inescapable: she had two sons, and both died by suicide. After her elder son Vincent died in 2017, at the age of 16, Li wrote a novel for him.

1 month ago | msn.com | Sophie McBain

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1 month ago | theguardian.com | Sophie McBain

Some years ago, Katie Kitamura came upon a headline that read something like: “A stranger told me I was his mother.” The headline gripped her, but she never clicked through to the article. She imagined the story would offer some explanation – perhaps the author had given up a child for adoption, for instance. “I was much more interested in not having a concrete answer but just exploring the situation itself,” she tells me.

2 months ago | newstatesman.com | Sophie McBain

The medical historian Mary Fissell begins her history of abortion with an account of her visit to a cemetery in south London to see the grave of Eliza Wilson, a 32-year-old dressmaker from Keswick who died in 1848 after an abortion went wrong. Historians have estimated that by the early 19th century, half of births in London were conceived out of wedlock, and that by 1850 rates of illegitimacy were the highest they had ever been.

Mar 6, 2025 | theguardian.com | Sophie McBain

Until the early 17th century, scientists believed that the heart operated a bit like a lamp, warming blood that had been produced by the liver. In 1616, when the English physician William Harvey corrected this misconception and explained how the heart works, the audience at the Royal College of Physicians booed him. Why did it take so long for scientists to understand the heart’s real function?