Professor Ian Stevenson

 

September 1999

 

He is a physician and psychiatrist at the University of Virginia in America. For 37 years, he has been studying children who remember their previous lives, providing detailed and accurate information about people who died before they were born – people they say they once were.

 

His dogged collection of cases – close to 3000 now – documented meticulously and cross-checked as well as his prodigious and scholarly publications have made him a hero to many people who would like respectable reasons to distrust the radical materialism of Western science. He once said, “I think a rational person, if he wants, can believe in reincarnation on the basis of evidence.”.

 

Some of his evidence does not come from fashionable New Age sources, past-life readings or hypnotic regressions. It is homely and specific: A boy remembering being a 25-year-old mechanic, thrown to his death from a speeding car on a beach road. He recalls the name of the driver, the exact location of the crash, the names of the mechanic’s sisters, parents and cousins, and the people he hunted with.

 

A girl remembers being a teenager named Sheila who was killed while crossing the road. She names the town Sheila lived in, Sheila’s parents and siblings. When Sheila’s family hears of the little girl’s stories, they visit her. While in front of witnesses, the girl recognises them by name and their relationship to Sheila without prompting.

 

From the time he learns to talk, a boy in Virginia, the United States, named Joseph, calls his mother by her name and calls his grandmother Mom. As he grows up, Joseph begins recalling obscure events from the life of his Uncle David, who died in an accident 20 years before Joseph was born – and who has been rarely mentioned because of the family’s abiding grief.

 

It goes on and on. In scores of cases around the world, multiple witnesses confirm that children have spontaneously supplied names of towns and relatives, occupations and relationships, attitudes and emotions that pinpointed a single, dead individual, often apparently unknown to their present families. Trying to make sense of these cases is what has involved Professor Stevenson for almost 40 years.

 

A 1975 article in the esteemed Journal of the American Medical Association mentioned Professor Stevenson ‘had collected cases in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds’ besides reincarnation. The article cited a book in which the professor had compiled his file studies, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. Each case had distinct particulars, each hinted at a narrative enough for a novel, but all of them shared some essential aspects: A young child spontaneously recalling another identity, recounting details of memory and knowledge that appeared to conform to someone else’s life.

 

Professor Stevenson has cases on five continents. Most he found in cultures in which the idea of reincarnation is widely accepted – places like India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Lebanon, as well as among tribal groups in northern Canada. Many of those cases involve families who did not believe in reincarnation, or had other powerful motivations to disbelieve the claims of their children, or the children claiming to be their dead relatives.

 

American sceptics often find the apparent lack of cases in their own environment a powerful argument against crediting evidence from Uttar Pradesh (India) or the Shouf Mountains (Lebanon). In fact, Professor Stevenson has collected more than 100 accounts concerning non-tribal North America children who claim having previous-life memories. As a group, the North Americans have fewer specific memories than the children in places like Lebanon and India. They tend not to talk about places or personal names as much, or at all, making identification of a specific previous personality unlikely.

 

The only American cases Stevenson has found where children have said enough to clearly identify a previous personality and included verifiable statements about their lives are “same-family cases” like Joseph’s, in which a child remembers the life of a relative. Such cases have at least two built-in weaknesses: There is a clear motivation – grief and desire for the return of a beloved family member – for the child’s family to unconsciously manufacture a fiction. And no matter a child’s statements about a dead relative, there is no way of ruling out the possibility that he came by the knowledge from other family members.

 

Despite his craving for professional acceptance, Professor Stevenson has shied away from publicity. He earned his medical degree from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, in 1943. In 1957, at the age of 39, he became head of the department of psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in the United States.

 

From there, he began his research into reports of children who remembered past lives, and eventually gave up his administrative duties to become a full-time researcher of paranormal phenomena, his professorial chair endowed by Chester Carlson, the man who invented the Xerox process. Apart from that single positive review of Professor Stevenson’s research in the Journal of the American Medical Association mentioned, mainstream science has almost completely ignored him.

 

In 1996, Paul Edwards, a philosophy professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, published Reincarnation: A Critical Examination, an energetic attack. In his introduction, Edward wrote, “The writer most frequently criticized in this book is Professor Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia. I should like to make it clear that there is nothing the least bit personal in the comments. I have never met Prof Stevenson…He has written more fully and more intelligently in defence of reincarnation than anybody else.” In general, Edwards wrote, Professor Stevenson’s cases may look good in aggregate, but on close inspection are “fatally flawed”.

 

“For me everything now believed by scientists is open to question, and I am always dismayed to find that many scientists accept current knowledge as forever fixed.” – Professor Ian Stevenson

 

The possible reincarnation cases that Professor Ian Stevenson investigated most intensely are those where the life a child claims to recall can be reliably established as belonging to a stranger, unknown to the child’s family, or anyone the family had contact with.

 

One case like that is of a girl who kept telephoning “Leila”.

 

This was Suzanne, a middle-class Druze girl living in Beirut who believed that she remembered the life of a woman who had died undergoing heart surgery in Richmond, Virginia, in the United States. Her parents told Professor Stevenson her story: When she was 16 months old, she pulled the phone off the hook and said, “Hello, Leila?” into it over and over. Soon Suzanne claimed that she Leila’s mother. By the time she was two, Suzanne had mentioned the names of this woman’s other children, husband, parents and brothers – 13 people in all. At three, she had recited portions of a funeral oration for the woman’s brother.

 

Ultimately, Suzanne begged her parents to take her to her “real” home and they made inquiries in the Lebanese town the girl insisted she was from. There they found a family who fit the particulars Suzanne had mentioned. And there they learned that minutes before undergoing her heart surgery, the woman in question had tried desperately to call her daughter Leila.

 

This family, including a sister of Leila’s, confirmed much of what Suzanne had been saying including names, places and the funeral oration for Leila’s brother. Suzanne identified members of the dead woman’s family from photographs.

 

Though she was a child, she treated the dead woman’s grown children as a mother would. She asked if their uncles, when they returned to Lebanon, had distributed “her” jewels to Leila and her sisters, which had been a deathbed request known only to the family.

 

Professor Stevenson arrived at the scene after the two families met; any new statements the girl made about the woman’s life would be tainted, because the professor would have no way of proving that the information didn’t come from the woman’s family.

 

His recourse in such cases is to concentrate on obtaining first-hand testimony about what the child said before the first meeting, and how he or she behaved at the time. The dead woman’s relatives gave in, but grudgingly – they had been rocked by Suzanne’s claims. That reluctance made their testimony all the more valuable, in Professor Stevenson’s view.

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