TL;DR
8/10. Two volumes, 225 case reports, and the reason this body of work is harder to dismiss than the memory cases alone. A memory is a claim. A birthmark is on the body.
Thirty years after his founding volume, Stevenson published the study his critics have the most trouble with. It runs to two volumes and well over two thousand pages, and it is not a book anybody reads front to back.
By 1997 he had documented 210 cases in which a child’s birthmark or birth defect corresponded to a wound on the person whose life the child described. In 49 of those he obtained the dead person’s autopsy report or an equivalent medical document and could compare the mark to the recorded wound location.
The two volumes contain 225 such case reports. It is a catalog, and it is priced and formatted as a reference work, which is part of why almost nobody who argues about Stevenson has opened it.
What is in Reincarnation and Biology?
The physical anomalies are specific instead of vague, which is the first thing that surprises a reader expecting hand-waving.
Hypopigmented scar-like marks with the puckered appearance of healed wounds. Port-wine stains. Moles in locations where moles almost never occur, including the soles of the feet. Malformed or missing fingers. Absent lower legs. Marks appearing in pairs on opposite sides of the body, in the positions an entry and exit wound would occupy.
A Turkish boy with the right side of his face congenitally underdeveloped described the life of a man killed by a shotgun fired at point-blank range on the right side of the head. An Indian boy born with severely malformed fingers on one hand described a life ending when a hand was caught in a fodder-chopping machine.
Stevenson photographed the marks. The volumes contain those photographs, which is a large part of why the work is difficult to argue with in the abstract.
Why do the birthmarks matter more than the memories?
Because a memory is a claim and a birthmark is on the body.
The whole difficulty with the memory cases is that statements can be shaped after the fact by families who have met and agreed on an identification. A physical mark cannot be. It was there at birth, it can be photographed, and it does not change to fit a story.
The autopsy subset is where this becomes serious. Anyone can find a correspondence between a mark and a story once both are known. Comparing a mark to a wound location recorded in a medical document written before anybody was looking for a match is a different exercise, and 49 cases is not a large number and it is not nothing.
That said, the base rate problem is genuine and Stevenson addressed it only partially. Birthmarks are common, bodies have a lot of surface, and a mark somewhere on a person will correspond to a wound somewhere on another person more often than intuition suggests.
Where is the method weakest?
In Stevenson’s own conduct of some cases, and he published enough detail for critics to find it, which is to his credit and does not make it better.
In one case a boy named Mounzer had a birthmark on the abdomen. Stevenson sketched it, then asked the mother of the man in question where her son had been shot, then showed her the sketch for confirmation. The critic D. Scott Rogo made the obvious objection: she should have marked the location herself, on a blank diagram, before seeing anything.
Stevenson also tended to discuss the weaknesses of a case in a separate section instead of inside the case report itself. A reader gets the case at full force in one place and the caveats somewhere else, which is not deceptive and is a presentation choice that flatters the material.
He was more honest than his reputation among skeptics suggests and less careful than his own method required. Both of those are true.
What happened to the work after him?
Stevenson died in 2007 and the research continues at the University of Virginia under Jim Tucker, who has published on American cases and has narrowed the focus considerably.
The field has not grown. It remains a small operation producing careful case reports that mainstream psychology does not engage with, and the reason is not simply prejudice. There is no proposed mechanism, and a body of anomalous data without a mechanism is very difficult for a science to absorb.
What has changed is that the cases are now sometimes collected before the families meet, which is the single methodological fix that would answer the strongest objection. There are not many of those, and they are the ones worth arguing about.
Verdict
The most significant thing he produced and the least readable. Approach it as a reference instead of a book, go straight to the autopsy-verified subset, and read the criticism alongside it.
What remains after every reasonable objection is a body of cases nobody has satisfactorily explained. That is not proof of anything and it is not nothing either, and Stevenson would have said exactly that.
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