Using real human cadavers, the Salt Lake City-based Institute of Human Anatomy (IOHA) teaches its over 15 million followers and subscribers from YouTube and TikTok about the body. Collectively, the institute’s content has garnered over 600 million views.
Despite all the success they’ve found, founding the IOHA wasn’t anyone’s original plan.
Jonathan Bennion, one of IOHA’s co-founders and the host of many of their videos, was a pre-med student at the University of Utah when he took a job teaching anatomy at the Utah College of Massage Therapy.
“I’d teach lectures down there and then take them up to the cadaver lab [on campus],” Bennion says. “When the relationship between the University of Utah and the college [was] terminated, the students were in a borderline uprising. Not many massage schools in the country get [lab experience].”
Bennion says he fielded messages from students for a year, all of whom were looking for a cadaver lab opportunity.
“Then one day at home, I was like, ‘Maybe I should start my own cadaver lab,’ because that’s a normal idea to have,” Bennion laughs. “The first person that popped into my mind was my brother-in-law, Jeremy [Jones]. He’s an entrepreneur and has managed a lot of businesses, and I had no idea how to start.”
Bennion decided to give Jones a call.
“When he said he wanted to start a cadaver lab, man, my entire thought process just shifted gears,” Bennion says. “I never thought that was going to come out of his mouth. But the concept alone was fascinating on so many different levels that it was immediately of interest to me.”
Jones, taking on the titles of co-founder and executive director, started making phone calls of his own from lab spaces across the valley to obtain licenses from city and state departments.
“Nobody knew what to tell me,” Jones says. “Nobody had any idea how a private business would do this because, at that point, there did not exist a private human cadaver lab in the state. They were all affiliated with a university.”
Eventually, IOHA found a home at a high school—Granite Technical Institute (GTI) in South Salt Lake.
From 2013 to 2019, Bennion taught anatomy classes at the lab for smaller colleges that didn’t have those resources. As part of their deal with GTI, they also invited high school students to the lab.
“We were kind of a match made in heaven,” Bennion says. “It’s fun to teach students who otherwise wouldn’t be able to learn about anatomical awesomeness.”
The cadavers the lab started with—and still use today—come from a donor program partnership. “We lease bodies and serve as their custodians for a period of time,” Jones says. “We still use my truck that I use to go camping [to pick up cadavers].”
It was all new territory for Bennion and Jones, and eventually, they saw a need to bring on more staff. Bennion had met Justin Cottle while teaching at Utah College of Massage Therapy and brought him onto the team to help teach courses. For both men, while they were making money from the courses and paying little overhead to the school, IOHA was still part-time work—until TikTok.
“I started looking for side hustles and got into digital marketing,” Cottle says. “I didn’t have any experience with social media; it was something I knew could make money…so I was like, let’s just figure this out.”
Cottle funneled his free time into the up-and-coming platform.
“At the time, the app was nothing but prank videos and dancing,” Cottle says. “We were one of the very first educators to use the platform, and it was slow going. We thought this might be a good opportunity to try and jump into an app that was less established. I had a good feeling about it, but it was also just a shot in the dark.”
Their biggest challenge, Bennion says, was content. “We’d always been bouncing around the idea of going online,” he continues. “But we wondered how to navigate it and how to stay true to our cause to respect body donations.”
The team found success when Cottle decided to cut out the middleman.
“I reached out to ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok because we have a lot of respect for the cadavers,” he says.
Cottle put together an IOHA sample video and sent it off for review. Within an hour, a representative from the company reached out and committed to helping them find a place on the app.
“We got approval from TikTok itself and their creative team before we put content out there,” Cottle says. “Again, we didn’t want people to be scrolling by dance video, dance video, dance video, human heart, dance video—we wanted to get it right.”
Cottle posted their first TikTok in November 2019, right before sitting down to dinner. When he logged back on that night, IOHA’s only video had 500,000 views. The next morning, it was in the millions.
Since then, IOHA’s view count (and following) has only grown. Cottle has remained in contact with the ByteDance team, going back and forth on different types of short-form video he could post while remaining within the content guidelines and holding respect for donors and their loved ones.
As the IOHA team has expanded to new platforms, they’ve managed to dodge content restrictions—for the most part.
“There have been frustrations,” Bennion qualifies. “TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and now Snapchat all have different lines for what they deem appropriate. Justin and I will have moments where we’re like, ‘Why is that video monetized when they’re dropping F-bombs left and right?’ Then we’re showing a human heart in a lesson about a heart attack and we’re [de-monetized].”
It’s not just algorithms flagging their content. Bennion says that comment sections can be bogged down by people questioning the morality of their posts.
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