Ian Stevenson

**Ian Stevenson**, M.D., was a Canadian professor of psychiatry. He worked at the University of Virginia, in the area of parapsychology.

Stevenson thought that the idea of reincarnation might help modern medicine better understand aspects of human behavior and development. He traveled a lot over a period of 40 years to investigate 3,000 childhood cases that suggested to him the possibility of past lives.
Stevenson saw reincarnation as the survival of the personality after death, although he never suggested a physical way a personality might survive death.

Stevenson's research was the subject of Jim B. Tucker's _Life Before Life_ (2005).

## Reincarnation research

Stevenson found that the best evidence supporting the belief in reincarnation comes from the cases of young children who, typically between the ages of 2 and 5, make statements about a previous life they claim to have had before being born.  Their statements are often accompanied by behaviour that is unusual for their family but appropriate for the life that the child claims to remember. There is often a "forgetting of the imaged memories between the ages of 5 and 8; a high incidence of violent death claimed in the claimed previous life; and mention of the mode of death by the subject".

Some 35 per cent of the subjects have birthmarks or birth defects which often correspond to injuries or illness experienced by the deceased person who the subject remembers. Medical documents have confirmed this correspondence in more than forty cases.

## Selected books

Ian Stevenson authored or co-authored more than a dozen books. Stevenson died in 2007, and many of these books are mentioned in his obituaries in the _British Medical Journal_, _New York Times_, and the _Washington Post_.
- _Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation_, (second revised and enlarged edition), University of Virginia Press,  , 1974. (This book includes detailed reports of 20 cases of children, from five different countries, who claimed to remember previous lives).
- _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_. (2 volumes), Praeger Publishers, , 1997.
- _Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect_. Praeger Publishers, , 1997. (A short and non-technical version of _Reincarnation and Biology_, for the general reader)
- _Children Who Remember Previous Lives: A Question of Reincarnation_, (revised edition) , 2000. (A general non-technical introduction into Reincarnation research).
- _European Cases of the Reincarnation Type_. McFarland & Company, , 2003.
- _A World in a Grain of Sand: The Clairvoyance of Stefan Ossowiecki_, (with Mary Rose Barrington and Zofia Weaver), McFarland Press, , 2005.

## Other websites

- The Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia

## Infobox (person)

- **name**: Ian Stevenson
- **birth place**: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- **death place**: Charlottesville, Virginia, United States
- **citizenship**: Canadian by birth; American, naturalized 1949
- **education**: University of St. Andrews (1937–1939)
BSc (McGill University, 1942)
Doctor of Medicine, MD (McGill University Faculty of Medicine, McGill University School of Medicine, 1943)
- **occupation**: Psychiatrist, director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine
- **known for**: Reincarnation research, near death studies, medical history taking
- **spouse**: Octavia Reynolds (m. 1947)
Margaret Pertzoff (m. 1985)