Ian Pretyman Stevenson (October 31, 1918 – February 8, 2007) was a Canadian-born American psychiatrist, the founder and director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

[1] He 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.

[12] His 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.

[9] Stevenson's critics contend that ultimately his conclusions are undermined by confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, and were reliant on anecdotal evidence rather than controlled experimental work.

[15] Upon his retirement, Stevenson's work was continued by research colleagues such as Jim B. Tucker,[16] Antonia Mills,[17] Satwant Pasricha, and Erlendur Haraldsson.

His first residency was at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal (1944–1945), but his lung condition continued to bother him, and one of his professors at McGill advised him to move to Arizona for his health.

[24] He 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.

He acknowledged, however, 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.

[29]In 1958 and 1959, 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 (1842–1910).

It caught the attention of Eileen J. Garrett (1893–1970), the founder of the Parapsychology Foundation, who gave Stevenson a grant to travel to India to interview a child who was claiming to have past-life memories.

[33] The bequest from Chester Carlson allowed Stevenson to travel extensively, sometimes as much as 55,000 miles a year, collecting around three thousand case studies based on interviews with children from Africa to Alaska.

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

In many of the cases, in Stevenson's view, the witness testimony or autopsy reports appeared to support the existence of the injuries on the deceased's body.

[37] Writing in the journal, the psychiatrist Harold Lief described Stevenson as a methodical investigator and added, "Either he is making a colossal mistake, or he will be known (I have said as much to him) as 'the Galileo of the 20th century'.

According to his New York Times obituary, his detractors saw him as "earnest, dogged but ultimately misguided, led astray by gullibility, wishful thinking and a tendency to see science where others saw superstition.

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

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

In the seemingly most impressive cases Stevenson (1975, 1977) has reported, the children claiming to be reincarnated knew friends and relatives of the dead individual.

[42] 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.

Chari wrote that many of the cases had come from societies, such as that of India, where people believed in reincarnation, and that the stories were simply cultural artifacts; he argued that, for children in many Asian countries, the recall of a past life is the equivalent of an imaginary playmate.

[45] Responding to this cultural argument, Stevenson said that it was precisely those societies that listened to children's claims about past lives, which in Europe or North America would normally be dismissed without investigation.

[47] Moreover, Joseph Prabhu, professor emeritus of philosophy and religion at California State University, wrote that it is not true "that these cases are mainly to be found in cultures, where the belief in reincarnation is prevalent.

[50] He argued that Stevenson's views were "absurd nonsense" and that when examined in detail his case studies had "big holes" and "do not even begin to add up to a significant counterweight to the initial presumption against reincarnation.

[53] Edwards cited the case of Corliss Chotkin, Jr., in Angoon, Alaska, described by Stevenson, as an example that relied entirely on the word of one woman, the niece of Victor Vincent, a fisherman.

According to Edwards, he failed to respond to, or even mention, significant objections; the large bibliography in Stevenson's Children Who Remember Previous Lives (1987) does not include one paper or book from his opponents.

[56] Stevenson wrote an introduction to a book, Second Time Round (1975), 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.

Since no trace of the name could be found, he concluded that no man called John Fletcher actually existed and that the supposed memories were a fantasy Ryall had developed over the years.

The fact that he did not speaks well for his integrity.”[63] Carl Sagan referred to what were apparently Stevenson's investigations in his book The Demon-Haunted World as an example of carefully collected empirical data, and though he rejected reincarnation as a parsimonious explanation for the stories, he wrote that the phenomenon of alleged past-life memories should be further researched.

[64][65] Remi J. Cadoret, wrote in The American Journal of Psychiatry that Stevenson's European Cases of the Reincarnation Type "provides an introduction to an exciting range of [unusual] phenomena and furnishes an inspiring example of a painstaking protocol to sift facts from fancy.