Dr. Paul Zoll (1911–1999) was an important American heart doctor. Dr. Zoll helped create tools that save lives, such as the heart pacemaker and defibrillator. Defibrillators now hang in the halls of schools, churches, and many places - in case someone has a heart attack. Anyone can use them to shock a person back to life.
Dr. Zoll was born in Boston to Jewish immigrants. His mother was from Russia and his father was from Lithuania. He graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1936. Although he was interested in psychology at first, his mother had a heart defect and died young. The doctors thought it might have been an unsteady heart rhythm. Dr. Zoll decided to change his focus in his very last year of medical school: for his mother’s sake, he decided to learn more about the heart.
In 1947, Dr. Zoll was caring for a woman who had fainting spells because her heart kept stopping and restarting. After she passed away, Zoll discovered that her only problem was a bad electrical system in her heart; her heart kept short-circuiting. If not for that small defect, she would have lived.
That inspired Dr. Zoll to create the defibrillator we see now hanging in hallways in many public places: a machine that can give the heart a shock and make it start beating again. And it works from OUTSIDE the chest; before Zoll’s invention, doctors had to perform surgery to touch the heart directly. Dr. Zoll's new way of using the machine on the skin of the patient's chest is what doctors still use today.
After the defibrillator, he built a heart pacemaker that helps the heart beat at a steady pace. This small machine is placed inside a person’s chest - and they don’t even feel it working.
His mother would have lived a longer life - with her son’s inventions.
Defibrillators A Brief History | Community Heartbeat Trust
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Zoll
