Medicine has evolved through various stages, including bedside medicine, library medicine, hospital medicine, and laboratory medicine. Similarly, the concept of modern public health also developed through a number of significant and fundamental shifts. This first chapter introduces the history of health and medicine. It offers an understanding of the background to the emergence of the health movement in India. The health movement is not a homogenous one, however. It may be best compared to a part of the alternative globalization movement, which, as a major collective force, emerged as a protest against the structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) within the developing world in the 1980s.