If you spend long enough in academia and if you try hard enough, then you will get to taste the injustice of having your very good work rejected, out of hand, with inscrutable rational, by some fancy journal. The correct way to respond is not to respond at all. This is the professional response. But what would you have to say, if you really could respond without fear of professional consequences?
In the 1960s, the neurologist Oliver Sacks had success treating patients with encephalitis lethargica or “sleeping sickness” with a new drug, L-DOPA. Some of these patients had been in a coma-like state for over 40 years, and the treatment he was trying had a dramatic effect, awakening them from their dormancy. He wrote a book about it, and the book became a movie. The movie won an Oscar. His work was not well received by the Journal of the American Medical Association, however.
Last month the New Yorker printed a selection of Sacks’ letters from this period, including a response to the rejection of his manuscript.
I need scarcely say that I was at first distressed, and even shocked, that innumerable observations based on years of daily contact with patients . . . could be so ignorantly and wantonly dismissed, or “wished away”: the attitude immortalized in Dickens’ Mr. Podsnap (“I don’t want to know about it; I don’t choose to discuss it; I don’t admit it!” . . . ). Your consultant(s) do not make . . . any substantive criticisms of my work, and have therefore descended . . . into petty jibing, pomposity, vapid rhetoric—in a word, Podsnappery. Indeed, if I did not know it directly, I could infer the importance of my own work from the very intensity of this threatened, denying, and defensive reaction. . . .
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/30/coming-alive
Another thing we lost, perhaps, with the end of hand written correspondence.