Sir Raphael Cilento was born in 1893 in Jamestown, South Australia. In 1918 he graduated from Adelaide Medical School and became a medical officer for the Australian Army in New Guinea. In 1922 he moved to Townsville to take up the position of Director of the Australian Institute of Tropical Medicine. Two years later he was appointed Director of Health and Quarantine Services in New Guinea. From 1928 to 1933 he served as Director of Commonwealth Division of Tropical Hygiene. Cilento left the Commonwealth service in 1934 to take up the role of Director General of Health and Medical Services for the Queensland government, a position he held until 1945. Cilento was made a Knight Bachelor in 1935. From 1937 to 1945, while Director General of Queensland Health, he held an honorary professorship in Social and Tropical Medicine at the University of Queensland. He was admitted to the Bar in Queensland in 1939 and in 1945, at the end of the war, he was appointed Chief Medical Officer for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Germany. His UN work continued in 1945 and 1946 as the Director of the Division of Refugees and Displaced Persons. Cilento eturned to Australia in 1951. From 1953 to 1968 he was President of the Royal Queensland Historical Society, and from 1966 to 1970 he served as President of the National Trust of Queensland. Sir Raphael died in 1985.