Ian Stevenson

Ian Pretyman Stevenson was born in Montreal in 1918 and trained in medicine at McGill University, graduating top of his class. He worked in biochemistry and psychosomatic medicine before being appointed head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in 1957, at thirty-nine.

He had a conventional and successful career ahead of him and chose to spend it on a subject his colleagues regarded as career-ending. From 1961 he investigated young children who made specific statements about a previous life, travelling repeatedly to India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Turkey, Thailand, and elsewhere, and eventually documenting more than two thousand cases.

His method was deliberately unpersuasive. He recorded what a child said, when, and to whom, interviewed witnesses separately, established whether the two families had prior contact, and then checked the statements against whatever record existed. The write-ups are dry, list the failures to verify alongside the successes, and include the alternative explanations. He resigned his department chair in 1967 to work on this full time, funded by an endowment from the Xerox founder Chester Carlson.

Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation appeared in 1966, four volumes of Cases of the Reincarnation Type between 1975 and 1983, European Cases of the Reincarnation Type in 2003, and the two-volume Reincarnation and Biology in 1997, which documented children whose birthmarks corresponded to wounds on the person they described.

He was careful to the point of stubbornness about what he claimed. He argued that reincarnation was the best available explanation for a subset of his cases, never that it had been demonstrated, and defended the word suggestive in his first title for the rest of his life. A reviewer in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted that he had collected the material painstakingly and unemotionally and that it was difficult to explain on other grounds.

He died in 2007. The research continues at the University of Virginia under Jim Tucker.