A: Mary was very rude to me yesterday.

    B: Well, you are getting a taste of your own medicine!

    Note: Giving someone a dose of his or her own medicine means teaching him/her a lesson by doing to him/her exactly the same thing he/she has done to others. Giving someone a dose or taste of their own medicine is probably an idiom inspired by a story in “Aesop’s Fables.” In the fable, a cobbler who’s not very good at making or repairing shoes finds himself losing business. So he roams to another town where he is unknown and starts a new practice as a medical doctor specializing in an antidote to curing all poisons.

    The long and short of it is that one day, the cobbler or doctor gets ill and the people try to feed him the medicine he’s been dishing out to others. The doctor refuses to eat it, finally admitting that his medicines are all fakes and that he is a shoe repairer by trade.