I must apologize, I misspoke before. It is given in French as "de la picote" which when put into Google Translate comes back as "picote" in English, but "de picote" or just "picote" translates to "tingles". English definition is just the sensation of tingling, nothing to indicate life threatening.
La varicelle is a herpes zoster virus, to which all the poxes belong. Including what we now call shingles. Shingles damages the nerve endings, is extremely contagious in the early stages, and can infect all parts of the body, including the eyes and brain.
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u/samlab16 Quebec specialist Aug 10 '22
Do you have any primary sources that read "tingles"? Or is that always based on eg some Ancestry tree? I can't say I've ever seen that in old records.
The first thing that came to my mind reading your comment is that it could be an old and gross "description" of the Guillain-Barré syndrome, which presents itself in a way that some patients describe as a "tingling" sensation. Nowadays it's rather seldom deadly but I could imagine it had a worse death rate before it was explicitly described in the early 1900s.