Jewish Invention Myths: The Defibrillator

Continuing on with my articles exploding Jewish Invention Myths we next have the Defibrillator.

Like the Pacemaker (1) this is widely credited by jews to the jewish doctor Paul Zoll in 1956.

The website ‘Kosher River Cruise’ writes how:

‘Jewish American cardiologist Paul Zoll played a pivotal role in the development of pacemakers and defibrillators. These life-saving inventions have revolutionized the field of medicine. Pacemakers, when implanted in the human body, help regulate irregular heartbeats, providing essential support to those with cardiac conditions. Defibrillators, on the other hand, can restart the heart in cases of arrhythmia and other heart problems. These innovations have become medical miracles, offering hope and improved quality of life for countless individuals battling heart conditions.’ (2)

‘Christian Learning’ has a similar tale:

‘For anyone suffering from a heart condition, these inventions were the medical miracle that was so desperately needed. It was the Jewish American cardiologist Paul Zoll who helped to pioneer the inventions of both the pacemaker and the defibrillator.’ (3)

While Stephen Pollard at the ‘Jewish Chronicle’ opts for the emphatic statement that:

‘Cardiologist Paul Zoll invented both the pacemaker and the defibrillator.’ (4)

‘Boulder Jewish News’ agrees with Pollard, (5) but ‘MNews’ doesn’t writing that another jewish cardiologist named Bernard Lown actually invented the defibrillator not Zoll:

‘Cardiologist Bernard Lown saved millions of lives with the invention of the defibrillator.’ (6)

By contrast Lawrence Altman at the ‘New York Times’ credits Zoll in his obituary:

‘Dr. Paul M. Zoll, a Harvard cardiologist and pioneer in developing the heart monitors, pacemakers and defibrillators used by millions of people around the world.’ (7)

As does Seigo Izumo writing in the ‘Independent’ in his obituary of Zoll:

‘Paul Zoll made decisive contributions to treatment of life- threatening cardiac arrhythmias by the invention and successful application in humans of the cardiac pacemaker, cardiac defibrillator, and cardiac monitoring in the 1950s. His discoveries saved and improved the lives of millions of people throughout the world.’ (8)

This – like crediting Zoll with inventing the pacemaker – is simply wrong since as ‘Community Heartbeat’ points out in their history of defibrillators:

‘Defibrillators were first demonstrated in 1899 by Jean-Louis Prévost and Frédéric Batelli, two physiologists from University of Geneva, Switzerland. They discovered that small electrical shocks could induce ventricular fibrillation in dogs, and that larger charges would reverse the condition.’ (9)

So, Jean-Louis Prévost and Frédéric Batelli of Switzerland first recognized the concept of defibrillation and applied it to living creatures (dogs) in 1899: some 57 years before the claim about Zoll in 1956.

Nor did Zoll invent the defibrillator since that was William Kouwenhoven at John Hopkins University in the United States in 1930 and the first use of a defibrillator on humans was performed by Claude Beck in 1947 also at John Hopkins University. (10)

Both Kouwenhoven and Beck were not jewish.

Zoll’s improvements to the defibrillator in 1956 were actually either created independently and later or stolen from a jewish surgeon and his team in the Soviet Union named Naum Gurevich who wrote about the use of defibrillators in the 1930s (specially referencing animals) and advocated using Direct Current (DC) rather than Alternating Current (AC) due to the significant side effects of the latter and produced a DC medical defibrillator for humans that seems to have been in use as early as 1952 in the Soviet Union. Zoll continued to advocate using AC in defibrillation long after the risks to the patient were well-known and widely documented. (11)

Ivan Cakulev and Albert Waldo in their 2015 review article on Zoll’s involvement with cardiological invention in the journal ‘Circulation’ have pointed out that Zoll has been accused – they imply more than once but we know at least one instance in relation to the pacemaker – of stealing the work of others and passing it off as his own. (12)

This along with various pro-Zoll mythologists such as his friend and fellow jew Stafford Cohen accounts for why Zoll has been falsely credited with inventing the defibrillator. Although it should be noted that Bernard Lown – who is a ‘Nobel Prize’ winner as well and is credited with ‘inventing by the defibrillator’ by other media sources like ‘The National’ – (13) only ‘invented’ the DC defibrillator in 1962 (14) some 30 years after his fellow jewish doctor Naum Gurevich argued for the concept in the 1930s and then seems to have invented and used the device on human patients by 1952. (15)

Scratch another jewish invention myth!

References

(1) On this see my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/jewish-invention-myths-the-pacemaker

(2) https://kosherrivercruise.com/jewish-innovations-throughout-history-that-transformed-the-world/

(3) https://www.christianlearning.com/jewish-inventions/

(4) https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/did-you-know-that-jews-invented-everything-g0z36e86

(5) https://boulderjewishnews.org/2009/an-informal-list-of-jewish-inventions-innovations-and-radical-ideas/

(6) https://mnews.world/en/news/the-great-jews-and-their-inventions

(7) https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/08/us/paul-m-zoll-is-dead-at-87-pioneered-use-of-pacemakers.html

(8) https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-dr-paul-zoll-1047054.html

(9) https://www.communityheartbeat.org.uk/defibrillators-brief-history; confirmed by https://www.defibmachines.co.uk/the-history-of-the-defibrillator/

(10) Ibid.; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10082664/

(11) https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.115.013843

(12) Ibid.

(13) https://www.thenational.scot/news/uk-news/19096052.tributes-cardiologist-invented-defibrillator-campaigned-peace/

(14) Ibid.

(15) https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.115.013843