Ian Stevenson

Ian Pretyman Stevenson (1918 to 2007) was a Canadian-born American psychiatrist who founded and directed the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Born in Montreal and raised in Ottawa, he studied medicine at McGill University, taught at Louisiana State University from 1949 to 1957, then chaired the Department of Psychiatry at Virginia from 1957 to 1967 and remained on its faculty for fifty years. He is best known for forty years of research into children who said they remembered past lives, collecting about three thousand cases and writing works such as Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (1966). Stevenson was cautious in his claims and called the evidence suggestive rather than compelling. Supporters saw him as a misunderstood pioneer, while critics pointed to confirmation bias, reliance on anecdote and errors in his case reports, and most scientists simply ignored the work.