Ian Pretyman Stevenson was born on October 31, 1918, and died on February 8, 2007. He was a Canadian-born American psychiatrist who worked at the University of Virginia School of Medicine for 50 years. He founded and directed the Division of Perceptual Studies at the school. From 1957 to 1967, he was the head of the psychiatry department. He held the title of Carlson Professor of Psychiatry from 1967 to 2001 and was a research professor from 2002 until his death. Stevenson helped create the Society for Scientific Exploration in 1982.
Stevenson is most known for his research on reincarnation, which is the idea that feelings, memories, and physical traits may carry over from one life to another. Over 40 years, he collected information from about 3,000 children who claimed to remember past lives. He wrote about 300 scientific papers and 14 books on reincarnation, including Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966), Reincarnation and Biology (1997), and European Cases of the Reincarnation Type (2003).
Stevenson was careful about his conclusions about reincarnation. He said the evidence he gathered "suggests" reincarnation but is not perfect and does not force people to believe it. He believed his research provided strong evidence that should be considered seriously. He thought reincarnation might be a third factor, along with genes and environment, that could influence certain fears, interests, talents, or health issues.
An obituary in The New York Times said Stevenson’s supporters believed he was a misunderstood genius, while critics thought he was sincere but too trusting of his findings. Most scientists ignored his work. Critics argued his conclusions were based on personal stories rather than controlled experiments and were affected by confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Some of his reports had mistakes or missing details. After he retired, his research was continued by colleagues such as Jim B. Tucker, Antonia Mills, Satwant Pasricha, and Erlendur Haraldsson.
Background
Ian Stevenson was born in Montreal and raised in Ottawa. He was one of three children. His father, John Stevenson, was a Scottish lawyer who worked in Ottawa as the Canadian correspondent for The Times of London or The New York Times. His mother, Ruth, had an interest in theosophy and owned a large library on the subject. Stevenson said his early interest in the paranormal came from his mother's collection. As a child, he often stayed in bed because of bronchitis, a condition that lasted into adulthood. This led him to develop a lifelong love of reading. According to Emily Williams Kelly, a colleague at the University of Virginia, Stevenson kept a list of all the books he read, totaling 3,535 from 1935 to 2003.
He studied medicine at St. Andrews University in Scotland from 1937 to 1939. However, because of World War II, he completed his studies in Canada. He graduated from McGill University with a B.Sc. in 1942 and an M.D. in 1943. He married Octavia Reynolds in 1947, and they remained married until her death in 1983. In 1985, he married Dr. Margaret Pertzoff, a professor of history at Randolph-Macon Woman's College. She did not share his interest in the paranormal but tolerated it through what Stevenson called "benevolent silences."
After graduating, Stevenson worked in biochemistry. His first residency was at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal (1944–1945). However, his lung condition continued to affect him, and a professor at McGill advised him to move to Arizona for his health. He then completed a residency at St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona (1945–1946). Later, he held a fellowship in internal medicine at the Alton Ochsner Medical Foundation in New Orleans, became a Denis Fellow in Biochemistry at Tulane University School of Medicine (1946–1947), and a Commonwealth Fund Fellow in Medicine at Cornell University Medical College and New York Hospital (1947–1949). He became a U.S. citizen in 1949.
Emily Williams Kelly wrote that Stevenson became unhappy with the focus on parts rather than the whole person in biochemistry. He then became interested in psychosomatic medicine, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. In the late 1940s, he worked at New York Hospital to study how stress affects the body and why people react differently to stress—for example, one person might develop asthma, while another might have high blood pressure.
He taught at Louisiana State University School of Medicine from 1949 to 1957 as an assistant and later as an associate professor of psychiatry.
In the 1950s, he met Aldous Huxley, a writer known for his interest in psychedelic drugs. Stevenson studied the effects of LSD and mescaline, becoming one of the first academics to do so. He described taking LSD as three days of "perfect serenity" and said it made him feel he could "never be angry again." However, he later noted that this did not last.
From 1951, he studied psychoanalysis at the New Orleans Psychoanalytic Institute and the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, graduating from the latter in 1958. That same year, he became head of the psychiatry department at the University of Virginia. At the time, most psychiatrists believed that personality is more flexible in early life. Stevenson challenged this idea in his 1957 paper titled "Is the human personality more plastic in infancy and childhood?" His colleagues did not receive his paper well. He later said their response prepared him for the rejection he faced when studying the paranormal.
Reincarnation research
Stevenson focused on understanding why different people develop different diseases. He believed that environment and heredity could not fully explain certain fears, illnesses, or special abilities, and that personality or memory transfer might be another possible explanation. However, he noted that there was no clear physical proof that a personality could survive death and move to another body. He did not claim that reincarnation definitely happens, but he said that in some cases, reincarnation seemed to be the best explanation for the events he studied. In 1974, he stated that there was strong evidence supporting reincarnation and that a thoughtful person could believe in it based on this evidence.
In 1958 and 1959, Stevenson wrote articles and book reviews for Harper's about topics like psychosomatic illness and extrasensory perception. In 1958, he won a prize from the American Society for Psychical Research for an essay about "paranormal mental phenomena and their connection to the survival of the human personality after death." His essay, "The Evidence for Survival from Claimed Memories of Former Incarnations" (1960), reviewed 44 cases of people, mostly children, who claimed to remember past lives. This work caught the attention of Eileen J. Garrett, who gave Stevenson money to travel to India and interview a child who said she remembered a past life. During this trip, Stevenson found 25 more cases and published his first book on the subject in 1966, titled Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.
Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography, provided financial support for Stevenson's work. This allowed Stevenson to leave his position as chair of the psychiatry department and create a new division within the department called the Division of Personality Studies, later renamed the Division of Perceptual Studies.
After Carlson died in 1968, he left $1,000,000 to the University of Virginia to continue Stevenson's research. This donation caused some controversy at the university, but it was accepted, and Stevenson became the first Carlson Professor of Psychiatry.
The money from Carlson helped Stevenson travel widely, sometimes up to 55,000 miles (89,000 kilometers) each year, to collect about 3,000 case studies from children around the world.
In one case, a newborn girl in Sri Lanka screamed when near a bus or a bath. When she could speak, she described a past life as a girl who drowned after a bus hit her in a flooded rice field. Later, investigators found a family of a girl who had died in that same location, about four to five kilometers away. The families had no known connection. Stevenson investigated these cases carefully, looking for normal explanations such as fraud, coincidence, or misunderstanding, but in many cases, he found no clear alternative.
In some cases, children who claimed to remember past lives had birthmarks or birth defects that matched injuries on the bodies of people they said they remembered. Stevenson studied 200 such cases in his book Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (1997). For example, a child with missing fingers said she remembered a person who had lost fingers, and a boy with birthmarks resembling bullet wounds said he remembered a man who had been shot. In many cases, witness accounts or autopsy reports supported the injuries described by the children.
Stevenson was careful not to make absolute claims about reincarnation but believed his research deserved serious consideration. In 1989, he said, "The evidence is not perfect and does not force belief, but it is strong enough that people who say there is no evidence at all are wrong."
Reception
The Journal of the American Medical Association called Stevenson's Cases of the Reincarnation Type (1975) a "painstaking and unemotional" collection of cases that were "difficult to explain on any assumption other than reincarnation." In September 1977, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease devoted most of one issue to Stevenson's research. A psychiatrist named Harold Lief wrote in the journal that Stevenson was a careful investigator and said, "Either he is making a huge mistake, or he will be known as 'the Galileo of the 20th century.'" The issue was very popular: the journal's editor, psychiatrist Eugene Brody, said he received 300 to 400 requests for reprints.
Despite this early interest, most scientists ignored Stevenson's work. According to his New York Times obituary, his critics saw him as "earnest, determined but ultimately misguided, led astray by gullibility, wishful thinking, and a tendency to see science where others saw superstition." Critics suggested that the children or their parents had tricked him, that he was too quick to believe them, and that he asked them leading questions. Robert Todd Carroll wrote in his Skeptic's Dictionary that Stevenson's results were affected by confirmation bias, meaning cases that did not support his ideas were not included. A philosopher named Leonard Angel told The New York Times that Stevenson did not follow proper standards. "[B]ut you do have to look carefully to see it; that's why he's been very persuasive to many people."
In an article in Skeptical Inquirer, Angel examined Stevenson's Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1974) and said the research was poorly conducted, which cast doubt on all of Stevenson's work. He said Stevenson did not clearly document claims before trying to verify them. Among other issues, Angel said Stevenson asked leading questions and did not properly record or explain errors in the cases. Angel wrote:
"In sum, Stevenson does not skillfully record, present, or analyze his own data. If a case regarded by Stevenson to be among the strongest of his cases — the only case of 20 that had its purported verifications conducted by Stevenson himself — falls apart under scrutiny as badly as the Imad Elawar case does, it is reasonable to conclude that the other cases, in which data were first gathered by untrained observers, are even less reliable than this one."
Skeptics said Stevenson's evidence was based on stories and that simple explanations, not paranormal ones, could explain the cases. Psychologist and neurologist Terence Hines wrote:
"The major problem with Stevenson’s work is that the methods he used to investigate alleged cases of reincarnation are inadequate to rule out simple, imaginative storytelling on the part of the children claiming to be reincarnations of dead individuals. In the seemingly most impressive cases Stevenson (1975, 1977) has reported, the children claiming to be reincarnated knew friends and relatives of the dead individual. The children’s knowledge of facts about these individuals is, then, somewhat less than conclusive evidence for reincarnation."
Robert Baker said many past-life experiences could be explained by known psychological factors. He said recalling past lives was due to a mix of cryptomnesia and confabulation. British author and researcher Ian Wilson said many of Stevenson's cases involved poor children remembering wealthy lives or higher castes. He speculated these cases might be a way to get money from the family of the alleged former life.
Philosopher C.T.K. Chari of Madras Christian College in Chennai said Stevenson was naive and that his case studies were weak because he lacked local knowledge. He wrote that many cases came from societies, like India, where people believe in reincarnation, and that the stories were simply cultural artifacts. He said, for children in many Asian countries, recalling a past life is like having an imaginary playmate. Philosopher Keith Augustine made a similar argument.
Stevenson responded by saying that in societies where people believe in reincarnation, children's claims about past lives are taken seriously, unlike in Europe or North America, where such claims are usually ignored. To address this, he wrote European Cases of the Reincarnation Type (2003), which included 40 cases he studied in Europe. Joseph Prabhu, a professor at California State University, said it was not true that Stevenson's cases were mainly from cultures that believe in reincarnation. In 1974, Stevenson's colleague J. G. Pratt counted Stevenson's cases and found that the United States had the most, with 324 cases, followed by Burma, India, Turkey, and Great Britain.
Philosopher Paul Edwards, editor of Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, became Stevenson's main critic. Starting in 1986, he wrote several articles about Stevenson's work and discussed it in his book Reincarnation: A Critical Examination (1996). He said Stevenson's views were "absurd nonsense" and that his case studies had "big holes" and "do not even begin to add up to a significant counterweight to the initial presumption against reincarnation." He wrote that Stevenson "evidently lives in a cloud-cuckoo-land."
Champe Ransom, who worked with Stevenson in the 1970s, wrote an unpublished report about Stevenson's work, which Edwards cited in his books Immortality (1992) and Reincarnation (1996). According to Ransom, Edwards wrote that Stevenson asked children leading questions, filled in gaps in their stories, did not spend enough time interviewing them, and waited too long between the child's first mention of a past life and the interview. In only 11 of the 1,111 cases Ransom studied had the families of the deceased and the child not met before the interview; seven of those 11 cases had serious problems. Ransom also said Stevenson presented cases by reporting others' conclusions instead of the facts that supported them. Weaknesses in cases were reported separately, not during the discussion of the cases themselves. Ransom concluded that Stevenson's evidence was the weakest kind of anecdotal evidence.
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Xenoglossy
Stevenson primarily studied cases involving children who claimed to remember past lives. He also examined two cases where adults under hypnosis appeared to recall a past life and demonstrated basic use of a language they had not learned in their current lives. Stevenson named this phenomenon "xenoglossy." Sarah Thomason, a linguist, criticized these cases, stating that Stevenson lacked sufficient knowledge about language and that the evidence was not convincing. She concluded that the linguistic proof was too weak to support claims of xenoglossy. William J. Samarin, a linguist from the University of Toronto, noted that Stevenson communicated with linguists in an unprofessional and selective way. He pointed out that Stevenson corresponded with one linguist over six years without discussing topics that linguists typically consider important. Another linguist, William Frawley, wrote that Stevenson did not examine enough linguistic details in these cases to justify his metaphysical conclusions.
Retirement
In 2002, Stevenson left his position as head of the Division of Perceptual Studies but continued working as a research professor in psychiatry. Bruce Greyson, who was the editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, became the new director of the division. Jim Tucker, an associate professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences in the department, continued Stevenson's research on children. Tucker studied this topic further in his book, Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives (2005).
Death and experiment
Stevenson died from pneumonia on February 8, 2007, at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia. In his will, he funded the Stevenson Chair in Philosophy and History of Science, including medicine, at McGill University's Department of Social Studies of Medicine.
To test whether personal identity could survive bodily death, Stevenson created an experiment in the 1960s. He set a combination lock using a secret word or phrase and placed it in a filing cabinet in the department. He told his colleagues that after his death, he would try to share the code with them. Emily Williams Kelly explained to The New York Times, "If someone had a vivid dream about him in which a word or phrase repeated over and over appeared, and if it seemed likely to be correct, we would try using that combination to open the lock."