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complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease.”9 Sociologists, medical professionals, and health activists debate the shortcomings of this definition, but it provides a broad understanding of health and is useful for my intent and purposes. In biomedical terms, medicine based on Western natural sciences and applied to the clinical setting, good health is often defined by an absence of disease. Well-being and wellness are used synonymously, and by them I mean an intangible, unquantifiable state of psychological soundness: the absence of dis-ease. In many ways, one knows what a state of well-being and wellness is by defining what it is not. It is not hunger, anxiety, stress, fear, despair, or depression. Joseph Verheijde noted that mental well-being is “the successful and satisfying exercise of intelligence, awareness, imagination, taste, good sense, and fellow feeling, for whose cultivation medicine can do little.”10 It may, but often does not, have physical manifestations.
Chapter 1 describes the physical and emotional health of black Harlem during the initial phases of black urbanization. Chapter 2 examines magico-religious workers and proposes that while an array of unorthodox healers assisted Harlem residents in adapting to their new urban environment, a nationwide and statewide movement was organizing to uproot them, which, in alliance with physicians, reduced health and wellness options in Harlem without improving health conditions. Chapters 3 and 4 consider how activists and organizations worked to improve health options throughout the community. While the rising citywide medical profession excluded Harlem's alternative healers, chapter 3 observes that it also excluded Harlem's black “regular” doctors from the Harlem Hospital. Consequently, though with only partial success, sectors of black Harlem mobilized to desegregate the hospital staff and make it more accountable to community needs. Since Harlem Hospital could not always be relied upon to provide