36 Facts About Ian Stevenson

Ian Pretyman Stevenson was a Canadian-born American psychiatrist, the founder and director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

Ian Stevenson was a professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine for fifty years.

Ian Stevenson was chair of their department of psychiatry from 1957 to 1967, Carlson Professor of Psychiatry from 1967 to 2001, and Research Professor of Psychiatry from 2002 until his death in 2007.

Ian Stevenson was founder and director of the University of Virginia School of Medicine's Division of Perceptual Studies and helped to found the Society for Scientific Exploration in 1982.

Ian Stevenson's position was that reincarnation might possibly represent a third contributing factor, in addition to genetics and the environment, in the development of certain phobias, philias, unusual abilities, and illnesses.

Ian Stevenson was born in Montreal and raised in Ottawa, one of three children.

Ian Stevenson's father, John Stevenson, was a Scottish lawyer who was working in Ottawa as the Canadian correspondent for The Times of London or The New York Times.

Ian Stevenson studied medicine at St Andrews University in Scotland from 1937 to 1939, but had to complete his studies in Canada because of the outbreak of the Second World War.

Ian Stevenson was married to Octavia Reynolds from 1947 until her death in 1983.

Ian Stevenson took up a residency at St Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona.

Emily Williams Kelly writes that Ian Stevenson became dissatisfied with the reductionism he encountered in biochemistry, and wanted to study the whole person.

Ian Stevenson became interested in psychosomatic medicine, psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and in the late 1940s, worked at New York Hospital exploring psychosomatic illness and the effects of stress, and in particular why, for example, one person's response to stress might be asthma and another's high blood pressure.

Ian Stevenson taught at Louisiana State University School of Medicine from 1949 to 1957 as assistant, then associate, professor of psychiatry.

Ian Stevenson wrote that their response prepared him for the rejection he experienced over his work on the paranormal.

Ian Stevenson described as the leitmotif of his career his interest in why one person would develop one disease, and another something different.

Ian Stevenson came to believe that neither environment nor heredity could account for certain fears, illnesses and special abilities, and that some form of personality or memory transfer might provide a third type of explanation.

Ian Stevenson acknowledged the absence of evidence of a physical process by which a personality could survive death and transfer to another body, and he was careful not to commit himself fully to the position that reincarnation occurs.

In 1958 and 1959, Ian Stevenson contributed several articles and book reviews to Harper's about parapsychology, including psychosomatic illness and extrasensory perception, and in 1958, he submitted the winning entry to a competition organized by the American Society for Psychical Research, in honor of the philosopher William James.

The bequest caused controversy within the university because of the nature of the research, but the donation was accepted, and Ian Stevenson became the first Carlson Professor of Psychiatry.

In one case of claimed reincarnation, as Ian Stevenson recounted it, a newborn girl in Sri Lanka screamed whenever she was carried near a bus or a bath.

Ian Stevenson was cautious about making any definite claims about reincarnation in his research, but felt his body of evidence demanded serious attention.

Robert Todd Carroll wrote in his Skeptic's Dictionary that Ian Stevenson's results were subject to confirmation bias, in that cases not supportive of the hypothesis were not presented as counting against it.

Leonard Angel, a philosopher of religion, told The New York Times that Ian Stevenson did not follow proper standards.

Ian Stevenson says that Stevenson failed to clearly and concisely document the claims made before attempting to verify them.

Skeptics have written that Ian Stevenson's evidence was anecdotal and by applying Occam's razor there are prosaic explanations for the cases without invoking the paranormal.

British author and independent researcher Ian Wilson argued that a large number of Stevenson's cases consisted of poor children remembering wealthy lives or belonging to a higher caste.

Chari of Madras Christian College in Chennai, a specialist in parapsychology, argued that Stevenson was naive and that the case studies were undermined by his lack of local knowledge.

Champe Ransom, whom Ian Stevenson hired as an assistant in the 1970s, wrote an unpublished report about Ian Stevenson's work, which Edwards cites in his Immortality and Reincarnation.

Ian Stevenson wrote that there were problems with the way Stevenson presented the cases, in that he would report his witnesses' conclusions, rather than the data upon which the conclusions rested.

Edwards said that Ian Stevenson offered no information about her, except that several people told him she had a tendency, as Ian Stevenson put it, to embellish or invent stories.

Edwards charged that Ian Stevenson referred to himself as a scientist but did not act like one.

Ian Stevenson wrote an introduction to a book, Second Time Round, in which Edward Ryall, an Englishman, told of what he believed to be his memories of a past life as John Fletcher, a man who was born in 1645 in Taunton, England, and died forty years later near his home in Westonzoyland, Somerset.

Ian Stevenson investigated the case and discovered that some of the historical features from Ryall's book were accurate.

Ian Stevenson wrote, "I think it most probable that he has memories of a real previous life and that he is indeed John Fletcher reborn, as he believes himself to be".

Ian Stevenson stepped down as director of the Division of Perceptual Studies in 2002, although he continued to work as Research Professor of Psychiatry.

Ian Stevenson died of pneumonia on February 8,2007, at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia.