Sir Raphael West Cilento (2 December 1893 – 15 April 1985), often known as "Ray",[1] was an Australian medical practitioner and public health administrator.

[3] He was educated at Prince Alfred College,[3] but although he was determined from an early age to study medicine, he was initially thwarted in doing so due to lack of money.

[1] As Director-General (a position he held till 1945), and combined with the presidency of the state's Medical Board (as well as with the medicine professorship at the University of Queensland), he firmly opposed the anti-polio methods of Elizabeth Kenny, although at first he had spoken politely enough of her work to give the impression that he favoured it.

[6] He achieved international fame after World War II for his work in aiding refugees with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

In August 1948, as Director of the Division of Social Activities of the United Nations, Cilento toured the areas affected by the fighting in Palestine with Count Folke Bernadotte, the U.N. mediator.

Cilento's later life in his native land was characterised by frustration at being unable to find appropriate employment in government service or academia.

Professor Mark Finnane of Griffith University has written in the journal Queensland Review that "[m]uch of his brilliance, energetically applied to the development of sound research and policy in the control and eradication of tropical diseases, was directed also to applying the developing techniques of epidemiology and tropical medicine in the service of ideas about racial hierarchies which had a firm basis in the nineteenth century.

Into the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, he was still writing about the white man in the tropics and racial vitality in ways that ensured his reputation for good work in other domains would struggle to survive his own monomania.