Q.
Is someone offering you ‘a taste of your own medicine?’ Well, that’s not good. Sounds like a threat.

But why is tasting your own medicine a bad thing? Whose medicine would you rather taste? How did this medicinal idiom come to represent unwelcome revenge?

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A.

Thank Aesop. We turn to one of this Greek fabulist’s short tales about a ‘cobbler turned doctor’ – ring any warning bells?

The man in question was just no good at cobbling; soon his shoe business went belly-up. What to do next? The clumsy cobbler made an alarming life choice: move to a town where he knew no one, and pretend to be a doctor.

Mr. Shoe MD didn’t limit his ‘practice’ to stubborn colds and bellyaches. He claimed to have brewed an astonishing potion, one that could serve as an antidote to all manner of poisons.

You’d think this would be a limited-time con, but somehow his magic doctor reputation persisted.

One day, wouldn’t you know, the Cobbler fell drastically ill.

‘Aha!’ said the skeptical Governor. He whipped out a cup, poured in some water, then, with a great flourish, pretended to pour in some of the cobbler’s potion. “Drink up! Your potent potion will save you!”

With all eyes on him – ‘Drink it! Drink it!” – the failed cobbler finally confessed that he, with his bucketful of potion, was nothing but a fraud.

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Header Art: Nick Fancher