Alterative

1. n. A medicine or treatment which gradually induces a change, and restores healthy functions without sensible evacuations.
2. a. Causing ateration.
3. a. Gradually changing, or tending to change, a morbid state of the functions into one of health.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.