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burkeyoudaoicibaDictYouDict[burke 词源字典]
burke: [19] In present-day English burke means ‘avoid’, as in ‘burke an issue’, but it can be traced back semantically via ‘suppress, hush up’ to ‘suffocate so as to provide a body for surgical dissection’. In this sense it was a macabre adoption of the name of William Burke (1792– 1829), an Irishman who with his colleague William Hare set up a profitable but nefarious business in early 19th-century Edinburgh providing cadavers for surgeons to dissect.

To begin with they obtained their supplies by robbing graves, but eventually, in order to get higher-quality material, they took to murdering people, generally by suffocation or strangling. Burke was executed.

[burke etymology, burke origin, 英语词源]