About the Author

Prologue 

                        Many important leaders who forge momentous change are remembered for what they did, not for the personality and character traits responsible for their success. Paul Maurice Zoll’s place in history is assured because of his medical milestones, but who he was and what personal factors contributed to his success have never been deeply explored. Zoll was a very private person and a man of few words. He did not record his personal journey. Nor had anyone else.

                       After his death in 1999, I realized that I could honor his memory by writing a biography that would present a panoramic view of Paul Zoll, promoting an understanding of the man who introduced the modern methods we use today to treat life-threatening heart rhythms with electric shock.

When I entered medical school in 1957, I met Paul Zoll and became familiar with his closed-chest pacemakers, closed- chest defibrillators and alarmed cardiac monitors, all in clinical use at the time. His implanted long-term pacemakers had been introduced and were saving lives when I completed my studies in 1961. During my post-graduate training at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital, Zoll’s success with complex cardiac patients was astonishing. He became my teacher and the mentor who directed me on a career path to cardiology. When my career progressed to the level of staff physician at Beth Israel Hospital, we became colleagues and ultimately officemates. In the common room that we shared, as a practical matter, Paul commandeered the shelf space at the lower levels and gave me access to the higher level shelves because I was a foot taller than he.

We became friends.

Paul Zoll’s discoveries were instantly appreciated by cardiologists who worked in critical care because of their high prospects for obtaining successful patient outcomes. As director of an intensive care unit, I applied his science. Dr Zoll’s algorithms for managing cardiac arrest worked well, as did the application of his pacemaker and defibrillator machines. His cardiac monitors were a godsend in signaling early warning of impending disaster. I performed temporary pacing, helped install permanent pacemakers, and had an office-based pacemaker follow-up clinic. In time, I became involved in managing the healthcare of each of Paul’s close collaborators or members of their families.

                        My perspective on Paul Zoll comes from those and other experiences throughout my career, experiences that have positioned me in the trenches as well as in an academic ivory tower. I have cared for patients, taught, published original observations, written reviews, edited and contributed chapters to books, reviewed articles for medical journals, and lectured about Dr. Zoll. Through that work, I became committed to telling the Paul Zoll story.

During approximately seven years, I reviewed Dr. Zoll’s publications and those of authors who mentioned him. I searched and located his testimony in old court records. Beginning in March 2006, I conducted audio and video interviews with Dr. Zoll’s neighbors, friends, co–workers, patients, and other pioneers. I encouraged many to write down anecdotal experiences that I collected, recording the last anecdote in May, 2013. During the intervening years, I gathered information from people scattered in far flung locations throughout the United States and from some foreign countries. Because my interest in Dr. Zoll was well known, some of his acquaintances approached me with important memorabilia. Nearly every person that I asked has cooperated with this book by agreeing to an interview or by contributing an anecdote, a story, or an artifact to the project. As a result, I have a small collection of his letters, early drafts of some manuscripts and some of his early “inventions”—although Dr Zoll did not regard himself as the inventor of his machines. The sum of my research yielded original new information that sharpened the focus and enlarged the field of knowledge about Paul Zoll.

This biography of Paul Zoll documents the high standards and values that permeated his research, his practice of medicine, his advocacy for patients and his resistance to innovations of questionable value. The last was crucial to his success.

                        I hope that my contribution will add to his legacy.

                        Stafford I Cohen M.D.