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Ian Stevenson
Gave up a chair in psychiatry to spend forty years interviewing children in villages, and never once claimed he had proved anything.
Who they were
Ian Pretyman Stevenson (1918–2007), a Canadian-born psychiatrist who became head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia in 1957 at the age of thirty-nine, and then gave the position up to investigate a question his profession regarded as beneath serious attention.
Where they came from
He trained in medicine at McGill, worked in biochemistry and psychosomatic medicine, and published conventionally and well before turning to this work. That conventional standing matters: he was not an outsider looking for a way in.
In 1958 he won an essay competition run by the American Society for Psychical Research with a paper reviewing the evidence for reincarnation in claimed memories of previous lives. The essay was read by Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography, who funded Stevenson's research and left the University of Virginia a bequest — around a million dollars in 1968 — endowing the Division of Personality Studies, now the Division of Perceptual Studies, which continues.
From 1967 he did fieldwork more or less continuously: India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon, Turkey, Thailand, Burma, Brazil, and among the Tlingit of southeastern Alaska. He is estimated to have travelled some tens of thousands of miles a year for decades, and accumulated around 2,500 case files.
What they taught
That the question was empirical, and should be treated that way. His method, described under reincarnation research, was to record what a child had said, identify witnesses, establish what had been said before any contact with the claimed previous family, and check the statements against records where records existed. He published the weak cases and the failures alongside the strong ones.
His central conclusion never moved beyond the word in his first book's title: suggestive. He wrote that the evidence was suggestive of reincarnation, that he could not exclude other explanations, that reincarnation was not the only interpretation of the data, and that he had not proved it. Colleagues who pressed him for a stronger statement did not get one in forty years.
His two-volume Reincarnation and Biology (1997) — 2,268 pages on birthmarks and birth defects corresponding to wounds — is the most extreme expression of his method: photographs, autopsy reports, measurements, and a refusal to draw the conclusion the material invites.
What we can and cannot say
We can say the work was rigorous by the standards of fieldwork. The reviews in mainstream journals, including a notably careful one in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, tended to say the same thing: that the investigation was scrupulous, and that the reviewer nonetheless could not accept the conclusion. That is an unusual verdict and a revealing one.
We can say the critiques are about structure rather than conduct. Champe Ransom, whom Stevenson himself employed as an assistant, produced an internal report identifying leading questions in some interviews, reliance on interpreters, and the reconstruction problem — that most cases arrived after the families had already met. Stevenson published Ransom's criticisms. Nobody has produced evidence of dishonesty.
We can say his self-restraint was his defining quality and possibly his mistake. By never overstating, he kept the work respectable and denied it the momentum a stronger claim would have generated. Carl Sagan, in The Demon-Haunted World, named Stevenson's work as one of three claims in the paranormal field that deserved serious study — a striking endorsement from that quarter, and one that has not led to the serious study he was recommending.
We can say the programme has not been independently replicated, and that this is the durable problem. Jim Tucker continues the work at Virginia, but the corpus remains substantially the product of one lineage of investigators.
We cannot say whether Stevenson found something. He spent forty years and did not say so either. What can be said is that he demonstrated it was possible to investigate a question of this kind carefully, at length, without becoming a believer or a debunker, and that very few people in this site's territory have managed it.
Further reading
- Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966).
- Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (1997).
- Tom Shroder, Old Souls (1999) — a sceptical journalist's account of travelling with him.