Parkes was born on March 29, 1819, in the village of Bloxam, Oxfordshire, his father being Mr. William Parkes, of the Marble-yard, Warwick, “a man of superior mind, remarkable alike for industry, firmness, and nobility of character.”[25] His mother, Frances Byerly, daughter of Mr. Thomas Byerly of Etruria, Staffordshire, was much occupied in literature, and her sister, wife of Professor A. T. Thomson of University College, London, was a well-known biographer and novelist. Under such favouring influences young Parkes grew up a gentle but unusually merry and happy boy. After being educated at the Charterhouse, he entered as a medical student at University College, and spent much time in his uncle’s laboratory, becoming an excellent manipulator, and already showing a fondness for research. At the first M.B. examination at London University in 1840 he was exhibitioner and medallist in anatomy, physiology, and chemistry, and medallist in materia medica. In 1841 at the final M.B. he was medallist in physiology and comparative anatomy, and gained honours in medicine. He had taken the College of Surgeons’ diploma in 1840. Of this period of Parkes’s life Sir William Jenner, an intimate fellow-student at University College, says: “As a student he was distinguished by brightness and cheerfulness, amiability, unselfish willingness to help others at any cost of trouble to himself, energy in work, diligence in the using of each hour for the studies of that hour, the high moral tone that pervaded his converse, and above all, and crowning all, by the real living purity of his being.” Early in 1842 Parkes entered the army medical service, and went as assistant-surgeon to the 84th regiment to Madras and Moulmein. Here he prosecuted inquiries which bore fruit in two small publications on the Dysentery and Hepatitis of India (1846), and on Asiatic and Algide Cholera (1847). But before this period he had retired from the army and entered upon practice in Upper Seymour Street, Portman Square, becoming further known as a physician by editing and completing Dr. Thomson’s work on Diseases of the Skin (1850). This was only a portion of his literary and original work at this time, during which he contributed largely to the _Medical Times_, and from 1852 to 1855 edited the _British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review_, for which difficult task he was exceedingly well fitted. Having been appointed one of the physicians to University College Hospital, his influence was very marked, both on his students and his colleagues. One of his pupils, afterwards a distinguished physician, said that he never went round the wards with him without feeling an intense wish to become better, and at the same time feeling that he could become so. In 1855 Parkes delivered the Gulstonian Lectures at the College of Physicians, taking the subject of Pyrexia, or the State of Fever.