Discussion on Ian Stevenson Reincarnation Studies

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The Scientific Evidence for the Existence of Reincarnation

A list of academic literature by the late Professor Stevenson, a former Head of a major university's Department of Psychiatry.

Profile of Professor Stevenson:

He was also a bright student who graduated at the top of his class:

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In 1977, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease devoted most of one issue to Dr. Stevenson's work. In a commentary for the issue, psychiatrist Harold Lief described Dr. Stevenson as "a methodical, careful, even cautious, investigator, whose personality is on the obsessive side." He also wrote: "Either he is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known . . . as 'the Galileo of the 20th century.' "

But with rare exception, mainstream scientists -- the only group Dr. Stevenson really cared to persuade -- tended to ignore or dismiss his decades in the field and his many publications. Of those who noticed him at all, some questioned Dr. Stevenson's objectivity; others claimed he was credulous. Still others suggested that he was insufficiently versed in the cultures and languages of his subjects to do credible investigations. Dr Stevenson responded that his critics should come investigate the cases for themselves. That did not happen.

And

Dr. Stevenson's credentials are impeccable. He is a medical doctor and had many scholarly papers to his credit before he began paranormal research. He is the former head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, and now is Director of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia.

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http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/dp5/stevenson.htm

Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect
by Ian Stevenson. Praeger Publishers, 1997; xviii + 203 pages, ISBN 0-275-95189-8, paperback, $17.95.

David Pratt

The world's leading scientific investigator of evidence for reincarnation is Dr Ian Stevenson, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia. For over 30 years he and his colleagues have been studying cases involving children who remember past lives. Most of the cases come from the Hindu and Buddhist countries of South Asia, the Shiite peoples of Lebanon and Turkey, the tribes of West Africa, and the tribes of northwestern North America. In 1997 Stevenson published details of 225 cases in a massive work Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. The same year he presented a summary of 112 cases in a much shorter book Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.

Stevenson has discovered that birthmarks and birth defects are often related to injuries sustained in the previous life, especially injuries associated with violent death. In many cases he has been able to obtain postmortem reports, hospital records, or other documents that confirm the location of the wounds on the deceased person in question. Birthmarks often correspond to bullet wounds or stab wounds; sometimes there are two marks corresponding to the points where a bullet entered and left the body. Birthmarks may also be related to a variety of other wounds or marks, not necessarily connected with the previous personality's death, including surgical incisions and blood left on the body when it was cremated. A boy who lost his fingers in an accident with a fodder-chopping machine and died of an unrelated illness the following year was reborn without the fingers of his right hand. A woman who had been run over by a train, which sliced her right leg in two, was reborn with her right leg absent from just below the knee. A man who, while resting in a field, had been mistaken in the twilight for a rabbit and shot in the ear, was reborn with a severely malformed ear.

Stevenson has found that most of the details that children remember about their previous life turn out to be accurate (he deals only with spontaneous memories and makes no use of hypnosis). Further evidence for reincarnation comes from 'behavioural memories'. Children sometimes display behaviour that is unusual for the child's family but fits in with what is known about the person whose life the child remembers. For example, there are cases where children of lower caste Indian families who believe they had been Brahmins -- and in their view still were -- would refuse to eat their family's food, which they considered polluted. Conversely, a child remembering the life of a street-sweeper may show an alarming lack of concern about cleanliness. Some children show skills that they have not learned in their present life, but which the previous personality was known to have had.

Many of the children express memories of the previous life in their play. A girl who remembered a previous life as a schoolteacher would assemble her playmates as pupils and play at instructing them with an imaginary blackboard. A child who remembered the life of a garage mechanic would spend hours under a family sofa 'repairing' the car that it represented for him. One child who remembered a life in which he had committed suicide by hanging himself had the habit of walking around with a piece of rope tied round his neck.

Phobias occur in about a third of the cases and are nearly always related to the mode of death in the previous life. For example, death by drowning may lead to fear of being immersed in water; death from a snake bite may lead to a phobia of snakes; a child who remembers a life that ended in shooting may show a phobia of guns and loud noises; and a person who died in a road accident may have a phobia of cars, buses, or trucks. Philias (the opposite of phobias) are also common. They frequently take the form of a desire or demand for particular foods not eaten in the child's present family, or for clothes different from those ordinarily worn by the family members. Other examples involve cravings for addictive substances, such as tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs that the previous personality was known to have used.

In some cases a child remembers a previous life as a person of the opposite sex. Stevenson comments: 'Such children almost invariably show traits of the sex of the claimed previous life. They cross-dress, play the games of the opposite sex, and may otherwise show attitudes characteristic of that sex. As with the phobias, the attachment to the sex and habits of the previous life usually becomes attenuated as the child grows older; but a few of these children remain intransigently fixed to the sex of the previous life, and one has become homosexual.