Most histories of medicine focus on a certain type of doctor: white, male, middle to upper class. They are the standard-bearers of medical expertise, the drivers of medical innovation. Treatment is clinical, professional, and in isolation. Yet these narratives underplay the role that ordinary people have, and have always had, on medicine and public health. The reality is that public health as we know it wouldn't exist without the medical innovation and community guidance implemented by marginalized groups. Whether filling the gaps to educate the public--as community activists did for the tuberculosis epidemic of the 1900s--or fighting for empathy, medical development, or help for those with stigmatized conditions--as Black activists did for addiction in the 1970s, and gay men did for HIV/AIDS in the 1990s--grassroots community care has always been at the cutting edge of medicine, a hidden tradition of meeting need with dignity. Medicine by the People tells this story in a new history of American healthcare centering the key contributions of those who are outside the professional medical system.