Daniel Noble (physician)

Daniel Noble (1810–1885) was an English physician. A friend of surgeon James Braid and physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter, he is distinguished for his contributions to the study of mental illness and epidemic diseases.

He was a Roman Catholic, born 14 January 1810, the son of Mary Dewhurst and Edward Noble of Preston, Lancashire, a descendant of a Yorkshire Catholic family. Apprenticed to a Preston surgeon named Thomas Moore, Noble was in time admitted a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and a licentiate of Apothecaries Hall. In 1834 he began to practise in Manchester, becoming a specialist in mental illness. He was President of the Manchester Phrenological Society.

Noble's views on mental illness influenced the terminology introduced by Henry Monro. He dropped phrenological ideas in 1846 after criticism from his friend Carpenter.

Noble died at Manchester, 12 January 1885.

• An Essay of the Means, physical and moral, of estimating Human Character 1835
• Facts and Observations relative to the influence of manufactures upon health and life 1843
• Mesmerism true, mesmerism false: A critical examination of the facts, claims, and pretensions of animal magnetism 1846
• The Brain and its Physiology, a critical disquisition of the methods of determining relations subsisting between the structure and functions of the encephalon 1846
• Elements of Psychological Medicine: an Introduction to the practical study of Insanity 1853-1855
• Three Lectures on the Correlation of Psychology and Physiology 1854
• The Human Mind in its relations with the Brain and Nervous System 1858
• On certain popular fallacies concerning the production of epidemic diseases 1859
• On the fluctuations in the death-rate 1863
• Evanescent Protestantism and Nascent Atheism, the modern religious problem 1877
• On causes reducing the effects of sanitary reform 1878.

In 1840 Noble married Frances Mary Louisa Ward, of Dublin. They had eight children, one of them Frances Noble the novelist, author of Gertrude Mannering (1875).