Ian Stevenson’s research: Cook excerpt #17

Nick Cook writes: The world’s leading authority on reincarnation, Professor Ian Stevenson, was a Canadian by birth who worked at the University of Virginia’s Department of Medicine for 50 years until shortly before his death in 2007. In 1968, eleven years after being named its chair of psychiatry, he was bequeathed a million dollars by Chester Carlson, the inventor of the Xerox copying process, to pursue parapsychological studies at the University of Virginia. Carlson’s funding allowed Stevenson to travel the world in search of the best evidence of reincarnation – research he eventually compiled into ‘Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects’, a 2,268-page, two-volume book published in 1977.51

This phenomenal work detailed accounts of people of all races, creeds and religions who professed to have memories of previous lives.

A typical case was that of an Indian girl, Kumkum Verma, who, aged three and a half, began to relate how she had lived in Darbhanga, a city of 200,000 people approximately 25 miles from her then home. Her aunt wrote down all the things Kumkum remembered about her previous life, which included the name of her son, her grandson’s name, the town where her father had lived and a pet snake that she used to feed milk to. A friend of Kumkum’s father went to the district in Darbhanga she had described and found that a woman who had died five years before Kumkum was born matched all the details the little girl had provided.

Hundreds more cases uncovered by Stevenson in India and elsewhere attested to certain common features, for example a tendency of subjects to talk about their previous life at a very young age - starting at two or three and stopping by six or seven. Most made their statements spontaneously and without the use of hypnotic regression. Some told of being deceased members of their own families; others, like Kumkum, of being part of families they had no knowledge of. Whilst most described ordinary lives, what often distinguished them was the way they had died: 70 per cent, Stevenson’s research showed, had died of unnatural causes, often violently and suddenly. In these cases, 35 per cent showed phobias related to their mode of death.

While some critics saw confirmation bias in this portion of Stevenson’s work, less easy to dismiss were subjects born with birthmarks and/or deformities matching the wounds inflicted upon them in their former incarnation.

In ‘Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect’,52 another seminal work that he published in 1997, Stevenson listed 200 cases, many including autopsy reports and police records, in which the birthmarks or birth defects of those with past life memories matched wounds they had suffered as their former personalities.

The subjects included a boy with birthmarks on the front and back of his head that matched the entry and exit wounds of the bullet he said had killed him in his former life; and a girl with what Stevenson described as the most extraordinary birthmark he had ever seen that corresponded to the skull surgery she said she had undergone in her previous existence.

All these cases, Stevenson said, represented tangible evidence of ‘carryover’ from a deceased individual, with concomitant impacts on a developing foetus.  

 

51 The work is currently unavailable. Published as (1997a), Reincarnation and Biology: A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects. Some details are available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Reincarnation-Biology-Contribution-Etiology-Birthmarks/dp/0275952835  

52 Published as (1997b), Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect, Westport, CT, Praeger.

 

Nick Cook is an author of 20 fiction and non-fiction book titles in the US and the UK. A former technology journalist, he is well-known for his ground-breaking, best-selling non-fiction book, The Hunt for Zero Point. He has also written, produced, and presented two feature-length documentaries for the History and Discovery channels. In 2021, Cook was amongst 29 prize winners in the BICS institute’s essay competition on consciousness. His essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.