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Reincarnation professor Ian Stevenson has died
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 UNITED STATES. Parapsychologist Ian Stevenson, MD, former Carlson Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Division of Personality Studies (now the Division of Perceptual Studies) at the University of Virginia, US, died peacefully in Charlottesville on 8 February at the age of 88 after a long illness.
His wife, brother and Icelandic parapsychologist Erlendur Haraldsson, who has also specialised in reincarnation research and is currently at the University of Virginia on a three-month visit, were at his bedside when he passed away.
The Canadian-born psychiatrist travelled the world investigating cases which he cautiously described as “suggestive” of reincarnation. He spent more than 40 years researching the paranormal and his findings in over 2,000 cases of claimed rebirth have provided us with perhaps the most impressive body of evidence, so far gathered, for the existence of the soul.
While other parapsychologists looked for evidence of psi in laboratory experiments, often producing results which were statistically only marginally significant, Stevenson realised the importance of studying spontaneous cases in which ordinary individuals appeared to be experiencing extraordinary phenomena. The field work involved in collecting such evidence was often arduous and occasionally dangerous.
Much of his research was conducted with children who appeared to recall a past life, and this confirmed a feature that had been noticed by other researchers. Typically, the child starts talking about a previous existence almost as soon as he or she can speak, and loses the memories within a few years – certainly by the age of eight – though there are always exceptions to this rule.
He was challenged by sceptics, of course, who offered various non-paranormal explanations for the evidence he was collecting, such as mistranslation due to bias on the part of his interpreters, fraud by the children’s families or sloppy scientific method by Stevenson. He patiently answered such claims and remained focused on his mission.
His first paper on the subject was a 44-page prize-winning essay, The Evidence For Survival from Claimed Memories of Former Incarnations, which the American Society for Psychical Research published in honour of William James, one of its early presidents. At a time when there was little research into past life memories, he examined 44 published cases and concluded that more investigations should be carried out.
He never expected to be the one who would do such investigations, but that was one of the results of his paper which was to change the course of his life.
Eileen Garrett, a famous Spiritualist medium and co-founder of the Parapsychology Foundation, contacted him after reading it and asked him to investigate the claims of an Indian child to have lived before. Stevenson accepted the Foundation’s offer to finance the trip which he made during his vacation.
Chester F. Carlson, inventor of xerography, the photocopying method, also read Stevenson’s paper and started to take a keen interest in his research, offering financial support. He even accompanied him on field trips to Alaska where the parapsychologist was interviewing the Tlingit people about their reincarnation beliefs and experiences.
By then, after his trip to India, Stevenson had realised there were many more cases in Asia deserving of research and that he could investigate them by reducing the time he spent on clinical practice. Carlson made that possible by making annual gifts to the University of Virginia.
“In 1964,” Stevenson has revealed, “[Carlson] made a particularly large donation that became the ‘deposit’, so to speak, for an endowed chair of which I was the first incumbent. It was, incidentally, one of the first such chairs at the University of Virginia. The funds of the endowed chair gave me more time for research, but the expenses of journeys to investigate cases still needed annual donations, which Chester Carlson also provided.”
 Early on, Stevenson – now the Chester F. Carlson Professor of Psychiatry – noticed a common feature in many of the reincarnation cases which had largely been ignored, or mentioned only in passing, in cases of children claiming to recall past lives. In a very high proportion of the cases, the child would have a birthmark or birth defect (such as that illustrated left) which appeared to correlate to a significant event in the previous existence that they were recalling.
On investigation, for example, he found that two small circular marks on the head of the subject corresponded to the wounds suffered by the past-life personality who had died after being shot in the head. The size of those marks were also similar to those indicated in the autopsy report, with the exit “wound” being larger than the mark that showed where the bullet had entered.
One such case could be considered coincidence, but Stevenson found several cases of bullet wounds to the head, and many hundreds more where marks and defects had striking parallels with gun, knife and machete wounds or bodily mutilation caused by industrial accidents (losing fingers in fodder machines seemed all too common in India, for example) or impact by vehicles or trains in which limbs were partially lost.
 Stevenson sat on this data for three decades while continuing to publish a stream of papers and impressive books on his research in many countries throughout this period, eventually publishing his monumental study, the two-volume Reincarnation and Biology: a contribution to the etiology of birthmarks and birth defects in 1997 (Praegar Publishers, £155). Each volume consists of more than 1,000 pages, with copious illustrations, and the work takes an in-depth look at 225 case studies.
A slimmed-down softback version, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (£13.50) made his findings available to a wider audience, though Stevenson clearly regretted the necessity of “brutally shortened summaries” in order to cram half the cases into 200 pages.
Even so, this important and extraordinary investigation failed to have the impact that Stevenson might have expected, either on science in general or the public at large. Which is no doubt why he agreed to award-winning journalist Tom Shroder – now a senior editor with The Washington Post – accompanying him on his last field trips before retirement, to Lebanon, India and southern America, to capture the human side of such cases that is too often omitted from scientific reporting.
Shroder’s book, Old Souls, provides us not only with a fascinating insight into the dedication and methodology of the intrepid parapsycholigist, but also an ultimately sympathetic account of the phenomenon and the evidence of past life recall.
 Stevenson’s role as division director and Chester F. Carlson Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia has been ably taken over by Dr Bruce Greyson (right), and Dr Jim Tucker, a board-certified child psychiatrist and assistant professor in the university’s department of psychiatry (below, left), is actively involved in continuing Stevenson’s field work in investigating reincarnation cases.
 They and their colleagues in the department are also involved in researching other areas of paranormal experience which Stevenson also investigated, namely near-death experiences, crisis apparitions and death-bed visions.
Though Stevenson’s research persuaded many people of the reality of reincarnation, he was always cautious about making his own views public, preferring to let the evidence speak for itself. Probably the closest he came to giving his view was last year, in a contribution to the Journal of Scientific Exploration (Vol 20, No. 1, 2006) titled Half A Career With The Paranormal which concluded with these words:
“We all die of some affliction. What determines the nature of that affliction? I believe the search for the answer may lead us to think that the nature of our illnesses may derive at least in part from previous lives. The cases of children who claim to remember previous lives and who have related birthmarks and birth defects suggest this; some such children have related internal diseases.
“My own physical condition, defects of my bronchial tubes (from early childhood on) … has given me a personal interest in this important question. Let no one think that I know the answer. I am still seeking.”
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Posted on Friday, February 09, 2007
Category: Reincarnation
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