Ian Stevenson

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Ian Stevenson
Ian Stevenson
Born	October 31, 1918(1918-10-31) Montreal, Canada
Died	February 8, 2007 (aged 88) Charlottesville, Virginia
Residence	Charlottesville, Virginia
Citizenship	Canadian
Nationality	Canada
Ethnicity	Caucasian
Fields	Psychiatry, Parapsychology
Institutions	University of Virginia
Alma mater	St. Andrews University, McGill University
Known for	Reincarnation research
Influences	Psychosomatic medicine
Influenced	Bruce Greyson, Jim Tucker, Satwant Pasricha, Carol Bowman

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Ian Pretyman Stevenson, MD, (October 31, 1918, in Montreal, Canada – February 8, 2007, in Charlottesville, Virginia), was a Canadian biochemist and psychiatrist who was a proponent of several pseudoscientific ideas. He was interested in reincarnation claims, near-death experiences, apparitions (death-bed visions), the mind-brain problem, and survival of the human personality after death. He also researched mainstream topics such as tissue oxidation, psychosomatic medicine, and psychedelic drugs.^[1]

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Division of Personality Studies 1.3 Retirement 2 See also 3 References 4 Bibliography 4.1 Selected books 4.2 Selected articles 5 Further reading 6 External links

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Ian Stevenson was raised in Ottawa, where his father was the Canadian correspondent for the New York Times. Stevenson studied at St. Andrews University in Scotland and at McGill University in Montreal, where he received a BS in 1942 and an MD in 1943, graduating at the top of his class.^[2] In the 1950s, inspired by a meeting with Aldous Huxley, he became a pioneer in the medical study of the effects of LSD and mescaline.^[3]

In 1957, Stevenson was named head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia. His early scientific research included psychosomatic illnesses, as well as writing textbooks on interviewing patients and psychiatric examinations.^[4]

Stevenson inherited a keen interest in the paranormal from his mother, who was a devotee of Theosophy. ^[5] He was best known for collecting and researching cases of children who seemed to recall past lives without use of hypnosis. After Stevenson published a paper on reincarnation in 1960, he was invited to travel to India and Sri Lanka by psychic and founder of the Parapsychology Foundation Eileen J. Garrett. The trip convinced him that the child cases were plentiful and impressive. Around the time of Stevenson's first visits to India, inventor Chester Carlson began to offer financial support for his work.^[6] When Carlson died in 1968, he left $1 million to endow a Chair at the University of Virginia, and a further $1 million for Stevenson himself to continue his research into reincarnation.^[3]

[edit] Division of Personality Studies

Carlson's bequest enabled Stevenson to set up the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia with the founding principle of conducting "scientific empirical investigation of phenomena that suggest that currently accepted scientific assumptions and theories about the nature of mind or consciousness, and its relationship to matter, may be incomplete."^[7] It remains one of several academic department in the world dedicated to parapsychology and other paranormal phenomena.^{[8][9][10][11]} It was later renamed The Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) with Stevenson appointed as Director.^[2] Stevenson resisted efforts to have the word "parapsychology" used to describe his department and research, arguing that his work was distinct from parapsychology, and was an extension of his more mainstream psychiatric work.^{[citation needed]}

Stevenson went on to conduct additional field research about reincarnation in Africa, Alaska, British Columbia, Burma, Europe, India, North America, South America, Lebanon, Turkey, and numerous other locations. Reportedly, the children studied usually started to speak of their supposed past lives between the ages of two and four, then ceasing to do so by seven or eight, with frequent mentions of having died a violent death, and apparently clear memories of the mode of death.^[3] Stevenson also gathered testimonies as well as medical records of information on birthmarks, birth defects, and other physical evidence for reincarnation.^[12]

Stevenson argued that the over 3,000 cases he studied provided evidence that supported the possibility of reincarnation, though he himself was always careful to refer to them as "cases suggestive of reincarnation" or "cases of the reincarnation type."^[2]

Critics have questioned Stevenson's methodology and objectivity in drawing conclusions from his research,^[13][14] and his work gained little or no support in the scientific community, with one critic writing "either he is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known as ‘the Galileo of the 20th century’”^[15][16] Stevenson recognized a limitation in using reincarnation to explain the phenomenon he investigated, namely the absence of any evidence of a physical process by which a personality could survive death and travel to another body.^[17]

[edit] Retirement

After the 1984 death of his wife Octavia, Stevenson married Margaret Pertzoff in 1985. He retired in 2002, although the Department of Perceptual Studies continues his work.^[18] Bruce Greyson has taken over as the Director while Jim Tucker, a child psychiatrist, is continuing Ian Stevenson's work with children, focusing on North American cases.^[19] Tucker said that toward the end of his life, Stevenson felt that his long-stated goal of getting science "to seriously consider reincarnation as a possibility" was not going to be realized in this lifetime.^[20] According to his University of Virginia obituary, Stevenson's greatest frustration was not that people dismissed his theories, but that he believed few had read the anecdotal evidence he had assembled.^[3] Stevenson died of pneumonia at the Blue Ridge Retirement community in Charlottesville, Virginia, on February 8, 2007.^[2]

[edit] See also

• C. T. K. Chari
• Afterlife
• Xenoglossy

[edit] References

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Selected books

• Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. (1966). (Second revised and enlarged edition 1974), University of Virginia Press, ISBN 0813908728
• Cases of the Reincarnation Type Vol. I: Ten Cases in India, (1975). University of Virginia Press.
• Cases of the Reincarnation Type Vol. II: Ten Cases in Sri Lanka. (1978). University of Virginia Press.
• Cases of the Reincarnation Type Vol. III: Twelve Cases in Lebanon and Turkey. (1980). University of Virginia Press.
• Cases of the Reincarnation Type Vol. IV: Twelve Cases in Thailand and Burma. (1983). University of Virginia Press.
• Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy. (1984). University of Virginia Press, ISBN 0813909945
• Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects Volume 1: Birthmarks and Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects Volume 2: Birth Defects and Other Anomalies. (1997). (2 volumes), Praeger Publishers, ISBN 0-275-95282-7
• Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. (1997). Praeger Publishers, ISBN 0-275-95282-7 . (A short and non-technical version of the scientific two-volumes work, for the general reader)
• Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Quest of Reincarnation. (2001). McFarland & Company, ISBN 0-7864-0913-4 , (A general non-technical introduction into reincarnation-research)
• European Cases of the Reincarnation Type. (2003). McFarland & Company, ISBN 0786414588

[edit] Selected articles

• "The Explanatory Value of the Idea of Reincarnation" (1977) Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 164:305-326.
• "American Children Who Claim to Remember Previous Lives" (1983) Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 171:742-748.
• "The Belief in Reincarnation Among the Igbo of Nigeria" (1985) Journal of Asian and African Studies, XX:13-30.
• "Characteristics of Cases of the Reincarnation Type Among the Igbo of Nigeria" (1986) Journal of Asian and African Studies, XXI:204-216.
• "Birthmarks and Birth Defects Corresponding to Wounds on Deceased Persons", (1993). Journal of Scientific Exploration, 7:403-410.
• (with Cook, E.W., Greyson, B.) (1998). "Do Any Near-Death Experiences Provide Evidence for the Survival of Human Personality after Death? Relevant Features and Illustrative Case Reports",Journal of Scientific Exploration, 12(3): 377-406.
• "Past lives of twins"(1999). Lancet, Apr 17; 353(9161):1359-60. (Letter to editor)
• "The phenomenon of claimed memories of previous lives: possible interpretations and importance"(2000). Medical Hypotheses, 54(4), 652-659.
• "Ropelike Birthmarks on Children Who Claim to Remember Past Lives" (2001). Psychological Reports, Aug 89(1):142-144.
• (with Pasricha, S.K., Keil, J. and J.B. Tucker), (2005). "Some Bodily Malformations Attributed to Previous Lives" Journal of Scientific Exploration 19(3):359-383.

[edit] Further reading

• Fox, Margalit. (2007). "Ian Stevenson, Academic Psychiatrist Who Studied Claims of Past Lives, Dies at 88." New York Times, February 18, p. 27.
• Shroder, Tom (1999). Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives.
• Tucker, Jim B. (2005). Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives.

[edit] External links

• Biography and Bibliography (WebCite archive)
• Division of Personality Studies (DOPS), University of Virginia
• Obituary from Daily Telegraph
• Obituary from The Washington Post
• Obituary from University of Virginia Health System
• Skeptic Report Review of "Children Who Remember Previous Lives"

v • d • e Reincarnation research Researchers Carol Bowman · Satwant Pasricha · Ian Stevenson · Jim Tucker Books Children's Past Lives · European Cases of the Reincarnation Type · Life Before Life · Old Souls · Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation · Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect