Nora or Devereaux Cannon

For the kid more than the Mom:

Read medical blogs - a bunch are linked here:
http://www.medrants.com/

Butcher and "autopsy" an eating animal. Compare what you find
with what you would find in a person - or another similar animal.

Learn some Latin and Greek - it will take you further faster than
all the math in the world for the first part of med school.

Volunteer at a vet clinic or zoo, which deal with a lot of the
same sick/well patient care, but without some of the privacy and
legal issues

Connect with a doc or nurse practitioner and see if there are
opportunities to "hang around and help". That's harder to do now
with various restrictions, but our 6 loves going by the office of
a doc whose 3 girls are homeschoolers - he shows her "stuff" and
answers all kinds of questions. After seeing an X-ray, she got
interested. We now have a skeleton in the corner of the kitchen,
wearing a base ball cap, yellow kneesocks and a host of Post-It
note lables of different bones. There is a box of miscellaneous
bones scavenged from the woods next to it - she compares them,
guesses where they came from, identifies features common and
dissimilar.

Get involved with a disability organization; though the medical
model no longer is welcome in the disability community, the
reality of chronic illness pervades those that deal with
progressive syndromes. Hippo therapy organizations frequently
need help with the horses, combining the vet type thing with the
disability issues.

Read medical thrillers, like Robin Cook's.

Check out the business of publicly funded medicine through
http://cms.hhs.gov/default.asp?fromhcfadotgov=true

Watch MASH

Sit quietly in the corner of an ER some Saturday night and just
watch (you'll need permission - or at least ought to ask for it
to be congenial).

Find out of the local hospital has a candy striper program.

Take Red Cross First Aid courses.

Talk to a pharmacist - preferable a Pharm D or a compounding
pharmacist - they are more likely to be in love with their field
and to answer questions enthusiastically. Anybody who loves the
field enough to want to talk about it is a wealth of practical
chemistry and will slide a slew of math right into your head
while you're not scrunched up afraid of the numbers.

Check out the local Community Mental Health Center to see if they
need help with clerical/activity related stuff and trade help for
brain picking about mental illness.

Watch a video (given away like sugar candy) about laser eye
surgery, then fiddle with lenses and focal points. Buy a whole
fish for dinner, but dissect the eyes for fun.

Go to Google and search the name of a disease, syndrome, organ or
whatever. While you are there, look at professional associations
in allied health fields and at different university med schools.
Faculty pages and PR's about research are full of cool stuff.

If there is a medical school nearby, go take a look at the
library; heck, buy some books from the school books store or
venture out to Amazon and get the anatomy coloring book.

.....if none of these appeal or you are out of ideas after trying
some, ask for more.