Ian Pretyman Stevenson, MD, (October 31, 1918–February 8, 2007) was a Canadianbiochemist and professor of psychiatry. Until his retirement in 2002, he was head of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, which investigates theparanormal.
Stevenson considered that the concept of reincarnation might supplement those of heredity and environment in helping modern medicine to understand aspects of human behavior and development. He traveled extensively 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 process by which a personality might survive death. Stevenson was the author of several books, including Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1974), Children Who Remember Previous Lives (1987), Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (1997),Reincarnation and Biology (1997), and European Cases of the Reincarnation Type (2003).
There has been a mixed reaction to Stevenson's work. Critics have questioned his research methods and conclusions, and his work has been described by some as pseudoscience. Others have, however, stated that his work was conducted with appropriate scientific rigor. Stevenson's research was the subject of Tom Shroder's Old Souls: The Scientific Evidence for Past Lives (1999) and Jim B. Tucker's Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives (2005).
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