Born on 22 August 1862 at Biddlestone, near Chippenham, Wiltshire, third child and only son of Charles Silk Banks, of the Inland Revenue office, and Catherine Mary Rich, his wife. He was educated at Chippenham School and University College, London, and entered St Thomas's Hospital in 1887. There he served as junior and senior obstetric house physician, house surgeon, assistant demonstrator of practical surgery, and clinical assistant in the skin department. He was awarded the Cheselden medal in 1891. Banks was in general practice at Ryde, Isle of Wight, 1894-1914. On the outbreak of war in August 1914 he was posted as ship's surgeon in HM transport *Dongola* for the voyage to India and back. From October 1914 he served as principal medical officer of the 1st British Red Cross relief unit in Serbia, serving through the typhus epidemic of early 1915. In April 1915 he became officer in command of the 2nd British Red Cross unit at Vrujachka Banya, was captured by the Austrians in November and worked under them. The captured unit was repatriated through Switzerland in March 1916. From October 1916 Banks was surgical specialist at No 8 British Red Cross Hospital at Paris Plage until the end of the war. He became director of the Victoria Hospital, Damascus, in March 1919 under the Syria and Palestine relief unit, and in July became the unit's commissioner for civil as well as medical business, in succession to Lord Lamington, until its recall to England in November. During 1920-21 he was again at Damascus for twelve months as director of the Victoria Hospital under its owners the Edinburgh Medical Mission, and in 1923-24 he was in charge of St Luke's Hospital, Haifa, for the Jerusalem and East Mission. After his retirement in 1924 Banks lived at Four Ways, Hadlow Down, Uckfield, Sussex, where he died on 9 September 1948, survived by two sons and a daughter. Mrs Banks had died on 1 August 1946.