Rowboat with ironclad in background

As similar as the practice of medicine was for both Army and Navy physicians--certainly in the treatment of battle injuries--the marine environment offered unique circumstances.  Sailors on blockade duty experienced little battle and much boredom.  Off Cape Fear, North Carolina, a sailor in the blockading squadron wrote home to his mother that she should get some notion of blockade duty if she would go to the roof on a hot summer day, talk to a half dozen degenerates, descend to the basement, drink tepid water full of iron rust, climb to the roof again, and repeat the process at intervals until she was fagged out.  Then she should go to bed with everything shut tight.