BC first: Hemodialysis

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 54, No. 1, January February 2012, Page 44 News
Related To:

January/February 2012 
BC first: Hemodialysis

November 2010 
Russell Palmer: Forgotten champion

After Dr Angus Rae published his article “Russell Palmer: Forgotten Champion” (BCMJ 2010:51:466), he was contacted by the prestigious Hemo­dialysis International saying they’d like to reprint the article, but with two corrections.

Meticulous researcher that he is, Dr Rae was concerned to learn of these er­rors, but was gratified to discover that his original findings were correct. First, Russell Palm­er’s hemodialysis in September 1947 was the first clinically successful treatment in North America using Dr Willem Kolff's original equipment, preceding that in New York by a few months. Second, Palmer was the first in the world to initiate an unassisted home peritoneal dialysis in January 1964.

Shortly after the BCMJ article was published, Dr Rae was contacted by a family member of that first home peritoneal dialysis patient and provided with documentary evidence supporting his assertion (yellowed newspaper articles from February 1965). 

To read more about these BC firsts, see Dr Rae's BCMJ blog post.

. BC first: Hemodialysis. BCMJ, Vol. 54, No. 1, January, February, 2012, Page(s) 44 - News.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

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  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
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For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

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