Paul M. Zoll was born and educated in Boston. He attended Harvard Medical School and trained and practiced at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston for the remainder of his career. During the Second World War, he and Dwight Harken described the operative removal of foreign bodies, shrapnel, bullets, and other metallic objects from within and about the heart and great vessels. These publications the ability to successfully operate on the heart, an intervention that had previously been done infrequently.