Paul Maurice Zoll (July 15, 1911 – January 5, 1999) was a Jewish American cardiologist and one of the pioneers in the development of the artificial cardiac pacemaker and cardiac defibrillator. He graduated from Boston Latin School in 1928.
Introduction
Paul Maurice Zoll succeeded in preventing life-threatening disturbances of heart rhythm and in restoring effective heart action to victims about to die from sudden cardiac arrest. He accomplished these feats with the application of indirect and direct electrical shocks that restored a life sustaining heart rhythm. Because of his methods, he has been called "The Father of Modern Cardiac Therapy". Still today there is an annual toll of approximately 450,000 sudden arrhythmic deaths in the USA alone. Paul Zoll was a pioneer with a panoramic wide-angle view of his patients’ needs gleaned from his office and bedside hospital practice. During his career, Paul Zoll equally divided his time between clinical care and research in his laboratory. His first in the world milestones resulted in paradigm shifts in cardiac care. Each conformed to the scientific "gold" standards with well documented detailed published data of laboratory experiments and results in patients that were replicated by independent investigators. Among those milestones are chest surface pacing of an arrested heart in 1952; clinical alarmed heart rhythm monitors in 1953; chest surface electrical shock ("defibrillation") to terminate life-threatening ventricular fibrillation in 1956; installation of a Zoll-Belgard- Electrodyne self-contained long term pacemaker in a child in 1960; and the introduction of a new concept that permitted "painless" chest surface pacing in 1982. The new device launched a small company that grew to be ZOLL Medical Corporation.
Paul Zoll developed methods of applying electric shocks to the surface of the chest that stimulated the heart within. When the heart of his first clinical success ceased to beat because its native stimulus signal failed, Zoll saved the man by substituting a sequence of chest shocks produced by an experimental pacemaker borrowed from Otto Krayer of the Harvard Medical School Department of Physiology. The next year he collaborated with Alan Belgard, the chief electrical engineer and co-owner of the Electrodyne Company, to develop an efficient chest surface pacemaker to conform to Paul's needs. That collaboration became long-term as together they developed production model chest surface pacemakers, clinical alarmed heart rhythm monitors, chest surface defibrillators, cardiac monitor- automatic pacemakers, and long-term implantable self-contained pacemakers.
Youth and education
Zoll's parents met in the US after emigrating from Eastern Europe. Hyman's roots were in Lithuania and Mollie's in Belarus. They settled in the Boston district of Roxbury, Massachusetts. Hyman worked with his father and brother in the family leather business. Mollie, in addition to being a homemaker, worked in her one-room home office electrolysis treatment center. The couple was Jewish and devoutly observant of their religion's customs and rituals. They were parents of two boys. The first, Herbert, was followed four years later by Paul. Both attended religious school and at the age of thirteen had a Bar Mitzvah rite of passage to celebrate their transition to manhood in the Jewish community.
Paul followed Herbert to Boston Latin School and Harvard College. Herbert graduated in 1932 with hopes of becoming an English teacher in the Boston Public School System. At Harvard, Paul majored in psychology with aspirations of remaining in academics. Because Herbert could not secure a teaching position, Mollie feared that Paul would suffer the same fate and advised that he pursue a career in medicine. (Herbert eventually did secure a position and rose in the ranks to become chairman of the language department at Boston Latin School.)
Paul graduated Harvard College summa cum laude in 1932 and entered Harvard Medical School (HMS). Because of high academic standing, he was able to spend a portion of his senior year engaged in cardiac research with Soma Weiss, the venerated mentor of students at the medical school.