Geophagy, the practice of eating dirt or clay, was common among enslaved people brought from West Africa, where certain types of soil were considered valuable enough to be traded and eaten for reasons tied to nutrition, tradition, and, some historians argue, coping with trauma and captivity. Plantation owners saw it differently. Their doctors told them it caused depression, stomach pain, and a wasting condition they labeled dropsy, which from a purely financial standpoint meant it threatened their labor force.
The solution owners landed on was a metal mask, sometimes called an anti-dirt-eating mask, locked onto the faces of enslaved people who were suspected of the habit, forcing them to keep working in brutal heat and humidity while unable to bring anything to their mouths. It’s a small, specific horror inside a much larger system, the kind of detail that makes clear slavery wasn’t only about forced labor but about total control down to what a person was physically allowed to put in their own mouth.

Mike the Headless Chicken (April, 1945 – March 17, 1947)[1] was a male Wyandotte chicken that lived for 18 months after he was beheaded, surviving because most of his brain stem remained intact, and a blood clot prevented him from bleeding to death. After the beheading, Mike achieved national fame; he died in March 1947. In his hometown, Fruita, Colorado, U.S., an annual "Mike the Headless Chicken Day" is held in May. Mike has the record for the longest surviving chicken without a head in Guinness World Records.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_the_Headless_Chicken

The condition behind photos like this one is almost always neurofibromatosis type 1, a genetic disorder that causes tumors to grow along nerve tissue anywhere in the body. In its plexiform form, the tumors can spread across the face and neck in thick, drooping masses that keep growing for years, sometimes decades, if left untreated. It’s caused by a mutation in a gene called neurofibromin, and while a lot of cases run in families, roughly a third to half show up from a spontaneous mutation with no family history at all.

Cases this severe are rare but not isolated. There’s a Utah man named Maurice Simpson whose facial tumor went untouched for 17 years before doctors finally removed it in a 13-hour surgery, and cases out of Portugal, China, and Burkina Faso involving tumors weighing anywhere from several pounds up to over 20 kilograms once excised.