Meaning
The same unpleasant treatment you have been handing out to others, turned back on you; deserved retaliation or a lesson experienced firsthand. It implies the recipient finally learns what their own behaviour feels like from the receiving end. Usually said with a hint of satisfaction at poetic justice, which can sound smug in formal writing. Dose remains a fully standard variant and was the earlier form. Regional use: General English.
Origin
Popularly traced to a fable attributed to Aesop, and the Phrase Finder does attribute it there. In the standard Townsend version, The Cobbler Turned Doctor, a bankrupt cobbler turns quack and sells a drug he calls an antidote to every poison; when he falls gravely ill, the governor hands him a cup said to mix that very antidote with poison, and the terrified fraud confesses he has no medical knowledge. Two honest cautions: the fable's quack is challenged with, not cured by, his own remedy, and there is no continuous documented lineage from Aesop to the English phrase. The dated English record is comparatively recent, and the earlier English form was 'a dose of your own medicine': the Farlex Partner collection says the metaphor has been in use since the mid-nineteenth century, Ammer dates it to the late 1800s, and her Dictionary of Cliches calls the medicinal metaphor a purely late-nineteenth-century development, citing V. Perdue's novel The Singing Clock (1941) as an early literary example.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a dose of your own medicine
- a spoonful of your own medicine
- get a taste of your own medicine
Usage Examples
- The supervisor who always scheduled others for night shifts got a taste of his own medicine when the rota turned on him.
- She had ignored their complaints for years, so the committee's cold silence gave her a taste of her own medicine.
- He was late to every meeting he chaired, and now a delayed supplier has handed him a dose of his own medicine.