Ian Stevenson, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia's School of Medicine, used a private donation to establish what became the Division of Perceptual Studies in 1967, giving him a formal, funded base from which to investigate cases of young children who spontaneously report detailed memories of a previous life. His method was documentary and comparative rather than experimental: he traveled to interview children and their families, attempted to identify the deceased person the child claimed to remember, and cross-checked the child's statements against independently verifiable facts about that person's life and death before either family had any apparent means of contact, publishing his findings most fully in the 1966 book Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation.
Over his career Stevenson assembled more than 2,500 such cases, drawn heavily from cultures where belief in rebirth is already established, such as parts of India, Sri Lanka, Lebanon and West Africa, though he documented cases in the United States and Europe as well. Since his death in 2007 the division has continued under successive directors, broadening its research to near-death experience, deathbed visions and other phenomena at the edge of consciousness studies, while maintaining Stevenson's original case database as an ongoing, actively updated resource, and it remains one of the very few university departments anywhere to treat these questions as a standing subject of medical research rather than as either settled doctrine or dismissed superstition.