The World Health Report 2000 adopted DALYs and DALE to measure the performance of the health system. DALYs and DALE are two kinds of Summary Measures of Population Health (SMPH). SMPH combines information on fatal and non-fatal health outcomes into a single numerical index. This index can be used to compare, decompose and evaluate the health status of the population. Several kinds of SMPH have been developed, which have different methods to obtain a complex of social and personal attributes that represent the health status. Different approaches of SMPH lead to different results. This paper introduces fundamental theories, typology, purposes, key ethics and issues and the technical methodology of SMPH.