Life and career
Ian Pretyman Stevenson was born in Montreal on 31 October 1918. He began his studies at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, returned to Canada when the Second World War broke out, and qualified in medicine at McGill University, graduating at the top of his class in 1943.1
His early career was in conventional medicine and psychosomatic research in Montreal, Arizona, New Orleans and New York. In 1957, still under forty, he became professor and chair of the Department of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Virginia. Ten years later he gave up the chair to direct a new research division devoted to questions the rest of psychiatry ignored, including whether personality can survive death. Funded largely by a bequest from Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography, that division is now the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS). Stevenson retired in 2002 and died in Charlottesville on 8 February 2007.1
Reincarnation research
Stevenson’s interest began with a 1960 review of published accounts of people who claimed to remember a previous life.2 From 1961 he travelled to investigate such cases himself, first in India and Sri Lanka and later in Alaska, Brazil, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Burma, Thailand, West Africa, Europe and North America.1
His method was that of a careful investigator rather than a believer: interview the child, the family and as many independent witnesses as possible, write down what the child said, ideally before the families met, and then check each statement against the life of the person the child seemed to remember. Where possible he sought documents such as post-mortem reports and hospital records. Cases in which the child’s statements led to a specific, identifiable deceased person came to be called ‘solved’.3
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966; 2nd edition 1974) set out this approach and remains his best-known book.4 The four volumes of Cases of the Reincarnation Type (1975–1983) reported detailed cases region by region.5 Reincarnation and Biology (1997), a two-volume study of 225 cases in which birthmarks or birth defects corresponded to wounds on the previous person, was his most ambitious work; a shorter version appeared as Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.67 He also studied unlearned foreign language (xenoglossy), phobias and unusual play linked to past-life memories, and published a collection of European Cases of the Reincarnation Type (2003).38 By the end of his career the DOPS files held about 2,500 cases.1
Reception and legacy
Stevenson always described his cases as ‘suggestive of’ reincarnation rather than proof of it, and he discussed alternative explanations such as fraud, faulty memory, cryptomnesia and ESP in his reports. Critics have argued that cultural expectations and the way families interpret a child’s talk can shape cases,9 while others have preferred explanations involving psychic abilities of the living.10 Independent replications in the 1990s by Antonia Mills, Erlendur Haraldsson and Jürgen Keil found cases with the same broad features.11
He served as president of both the Parapsychological Association and the Society for Psychical Research.1 His work at the University of Virginia is continued today, and almost every later study of children who remember previous lives builds on his methods.12