Glen Clova defibrillator

Defibrillator units like this are becoming a common sight. Often they are inside the phone box but there is no mobile signal at Glen Clova so the phone is still in use. A defibrillator is basically a large capacitor with a small time constant that means it can discharge a lot of energy through the heart in a short space of time. The idea is to knock the heart muscle back into its regular rhythm. This site has excellent details about the wiring: http://www.frca.co.uk/article.aspx?articleid=100392 I was interested to see that there is also an inductance in the discharge circuit. It says that it is there to prolong the duration of the current flow. I would have thought that you just go for a bigger resistor to increase the time constant because time constant = capacitance x resistance but maybe the bigger resistance increases the time by decreasing the current. Using an inductance probably gives longer time for the same higher current.