Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Confederate States of America purchased the vessel on the 7th of November 1861. It served as a barracks ship before Union forces captured it after the fall of Island Number Ten on April 7.
Engineers installed a separate operating room, a galley below deck, and nine water closets with numerous bathrooms. They added steam boiler powered laundry operations and an elevator to facilitate movement between decks while improving air circulation in cabin spaces aft.
Three Sisters of the Order of the Holy Cross joined the medical staff in December 1862 alongside five African-American former slaves known as Boys. Ann Bradford Stokes, Ellen Campbell, Alice Kennedy, Sarah Kinno and Betsy Young formed this pioneering group that predated the official formation of the Navy Nurse Corps by decades.
The hospital ship housed 55 patients within her wards by the 14th of June 1862. She accepted her first patient David Sans from gunboat USS Benton on the 11th of June 1862 before transporting extreme burn cases to Memphis Tennessee.
Fleet Surgeon Ninian A. Pinckney implemented strict daily standards that reduced sickness rates significantly despite poor sanitation across both sides of the conflict. He claimed by 1865 that less sickness existed in his fleet than anywhere else globally while typhoid fever and other diseases claimed more lives than gunshot wounds.