Marc Lalonde, who was the Canadian Minister of National Health and Welfare in 1974, proposed a new "health field" concept, as distinct from medical care. Lalonde noted that the "traditional or generally-accepted view of the health field is that the art or science of medicine has been the fount from which all improvements in health have flowed, and popular belief equates the level of health with the quality of medicine." The new concept "envisage[d] that the health field can be broken up into four broad elements: Human biology, Environment, Lifestyle, and Health care organization;" that is, determinants of health existed outside of the health care systems.
