For these good reasons, I have therefore thought it most proper and advisable to make this appeal to our highest civilian official and our Chief Military Commander, who is so potently equipped to give the immediate relief and establish the reform herein asked for, viz., the full Medical Freedom to accept or refuse vaccination as each individual sees fit, which is a basic and inherent American right; and I therefore now submit the numerous and conclusive facts and demonstrations in these pages for the special consideration of the President and the general attention of the People and their Representatives in our National and State Legislatures, and as a full justification of the reform prayed for.
In conclusion, I might say that I first began this work as a simple Letter of Petition to the President to abolish forced vaccination in the Army and Navy, with a brief outline of reasons for this reform, which letter was commenced before the President sailed for Europe to attend the World Peace Conference. But the importance and scope of the subject grew as I worked on it, and I concluded to expand the letter into a full illustration and demonstration of the Horrors of Compulsory Vaccination, its failures, falsehoods, futilities and fatalities, which would be so thorough and convincing that it could not be disregarded. This enlarged work has required nearly twelve months to complete and make ready for the consideration of the President after his return from the Peace Conference, and its publication has been much delayed by several unavoidable conditions, including the recent great strike in the printing trades.
I might further state in conclusion that I have spent a lifetime and a fortune in the study and investigation of this subject and in efforts for the repeal of all unwise laws for forcing vaccination upon the people, which repeal is now being agitated and is progressing all over the civilized world. And as I probably shall not be able to work many more years in this great cause of Medical Freedom, and as this may be my last contribution to the cause, I have concluded to make the case against Compulsory Vaccination so full and complete in this Exposure that there can be no question of its medical malpractice and its dangerous, deadly and illegal nature.
For these reasons I have also thought it my duty to give to the public the benefit of my studies of a lifetime and the accumulation of the many shocking facts, proofs and exhibits which I have been collecting for years, and which, as now massed in the Petition and its Illustrated Supplement, can, I think, leave no doubt in the mind of any reasonable man or woman—not professionally interested in vaccination—that all Compulsory Vaccination should be immediately abolished, and that its continuation, with these proofs against it, would be a most gross medical blunder and malpractice and a grave violation of the basic American principle of Inherent Individual Rights, in being a serious menace to human health and life, a frequent cause of wide-spread epidemics and demonstrably more fatal in many instances than natural disease itself, and therefore a shocking violation of all true medical ethics and a disgrace alike to modern medicine and modern legislation which should no longer tolerate the practice.
Chas. M. Higgins.
Dated at 271 Ninth St., Brooklyn, N. Y.,
December 1, 1919.
HORRORS OF VACCINATION EXPOSED AND ILLUSTRATED
PETITION TO THE PRESIDENT TO ABOLISH COMPULSORY VACCINATION IN ARMY AND NAVY
Subject, in Brief: Request to the President as Commander-in-Chief to abolish Compulsory Vaccination in Army and Navy, to make all vaccination voluntary as it now is in the English Army, and to pardon all men condemned by Court Martial for refusing coercive vaccination.