I recently visited my sister and her family. Right at the start of my visit I took a drink of water out of a glass which was standing in front of me. “You didn’t drink out of that, did you?” asked my sister. “That glass belongs to Luise, and she’s highly contagious.” I bent over the glass and spat the following words into it; “Make sure you don’t catch the Stefan disease!” Then I drank all the water in the glass. And nothing else happened – at any rate not to me.

A variation on the intervention in “Morbus Feivel” can be seen in the story “Risk of Contagion”. The story externalises the problematic bodily experience into the glass and gives implied instructions to the immune system to switch from a defensive to an offensive position

(From: Stefan Hammel: Handbook of Therapeutic Storytelling. Sories and Metaphors in Psychotherapy, Child and Family Therapy, Medical Treatment, Coaching and Supervision, Routledge 2019)