---
title: "Ian Stevenson"
chunk: 5/5
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Stevenson"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:38:05.034547+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Concessions from critics ===
Ian Wilson, one of Stevenson's critics, acknowledged that Stevenson had brought “a new professionalism to a hitherto crank-prone field.” Paul Edwards wrote that Stevenson “has written more fully and more intelligibly in defense of reincarnation than anybody else.” Though faulting Stevenson's judgment, Edwards wrote: “I have the highest regard for his honesty. All of his case reports contain items that can be made the basis of criticism. Stevenson could easily have suppressed this information. The fact that he did not speaks well for his integrity.”
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.

=== Support ===
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."
Lester S. King, pathologist, reviewed the first volume of Cases of the Reincarnation Type for the JAMA Journal. King wrote, "He may not convince skeptics, but he has placed on record a large amount of data that cannot be ignored."

== Xenoglossy ==
Although Stevenson mainly focused on cases of children who seemed to remember past lives, he also studied two cases in which adults under hypnosis seemed to remember a past life and show rudimentary use of a language they had not learned in the present life. Stevenson called this phenomenon "xenoglossy." The linguist Sarah Thomason, critiquing these cases, wrote that Stevenson is "unsophisticated about language" and that the cases are unconvincing. Thomason concluded, "the linguistic evidence is too weak to provide support for the claims of xenoglossy." William J. Samarin, a linguist from the University of Toronto, wrote that Stevenson corresponded with linguists in a selective and unprofessional manner. He said that Stevenson corresponded with one linguist in a period of six years "without raising any discussion about the kinds of thing that linguists would need to know." Another linguist, William Frawley, wrote, "Stevenson does not consider enough linguistic evidence in these cases to warrant his metaphysics."

== Retirement ==

Stevenson stepped down as director of the Division of Perceptual Studies in 2002, although he continued to work as research professor of psychiatry. Bruce Greyson, editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, became director of the division. Jim Tucker, the department's associate professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences, continued Stevenson's research with children, examined in Tucker's book, Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives (2005).

== Death and experiment ==
Stevenson died of pneumonia on February 8, 2007, at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia. In his will he endowed the Stevenson Chair in Philosophy and History of Science including Medicine, at McGill University Department of Social Studies of Medicine.
As one experiment to test for personal survival of bodily death, in the 1960s Stevenson set a combination lock using a secret word or phrase and placed it in a filing cabinet in the department, telling his colleagues he would try to pass the code to them after his death. Emily Williams Kelly told The New York Times: "Presumably, if someone had a vivid dream about him, in which there seemed to be a word or a phrase that kept being repeated—I don't quite know how it would work—if it seemed promising enough, we would try to open it using the combination suggested."

== Works ==
Books

Selected articles

An extended list of Stevenson's works is online.

== See also ==

== References ==