A Taste of Your Own Medicine
"To be treated the way you have treated others, especially badly."
Traces to Aesop's fable "The Cobbler Turned Doctor." A cobbler poses as a physician, prescribing a remedy that happens to cure one patient but kills another with a different ailment entirely. When the fraudulent cobbler-doctor himself falls ill, the townspeople force him to take his own remedy, quite literally giving him a taste of his own medicine, with fatal results in the original story. Aesop's fables were translated into English in the mid-1600s, seeding a number of idioms still in everyday use, this one among them.
Sources: Aesop, 'The Cobbler Turned Doctor'; Aesop's Fables translated into English from the mid-17th century.
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