Stories were everything to Syl Jones, and he used them not only to make sense of this world, but to imagine new ones.

Jones, a provocative playwright, dissenting columnist, and evangelical pioneer in the field of narrative medicine, in which doctors and nurses improve outcomes by understanding and treating the whole person, not just isolated symptoms, will be born Nov. 10 in St. He died at Sholom Home West in St. Louis. Park. He was 72 years old.

On Aug. 27, 2020, when he was scheduled to teach doctors and nurses at Hennepin Healthcare, he went into hospice care after suffering a devastating stroke, according to his son, McGraw Jones.

If there was one consolation to his final days, said Jack Reuler, founder of Mixed Blood Theater, which hired Jones as a longtime playwright in residence, it was that he had a glimpse of what the end of his work in health care and theater might look like. ten years.

Jones conducted workshops and wrote plays to teach doctors to better recognize themselves as carriers of trauma and stress and to better understand their patients.

“Without a doubt, Syl left the world better than she found it,” Reuler said.

He is known publicly, on stage, and for decades of writing caustic opinion pieces on social, cultural, and political issues in newspapers such as the Minnesota Star Tribune and Minneapolis Spokesman-Recorder.

His plays advocated for the oppressed and included “Black No More,” based on George Schuyler’s classic science fiction novel about an invention that turns black people into white, thus eliminating the justification for racism. The satire premiered at the Guthrie Theater in 1998 and then traveled to the Arena Stage in Washington, DC.