There are book prizes and there are book prizes. After a while, they blur into one. Last month, we had the Man Booker, which, as usual, garnered hysterical controversy and prompted the annual "whither the novel" debate. Then there are the others - the Orange, the Betty Trask, the Costa, the Guardian First Book, and let's not forget the Bad Sex in Fiction (coming up shortly).

We know the arguments: it's good to celebrate authors, to boost book sales, to give everyone in publishing a reliable string of parties and source of free booze in these straitened times. But it can get a little wearing and confusing.

The answer? Seek out the lesser-spotted book prize, the one that dips beneath the radar, such as that of the Wellcome Trust,
now in its third year. The annual prize rewards "outstanding works of fiction and non-fiction on the theme of health and medicine". The judges (chaired by the writer and broadcaster Vivienne Parry) are not fussy about genre - submissions can be fiction or non-fiction, memoir, biography or fairy tale.

This year's shortlist ranged from Philip Roth's novel Nemesis through to a giant tome on cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. The winner, announced on 9 November at the Wellcome Collection, was Alice LaPlante for her debut novel, Turn of Mind. A thriller of sorts, the book is written from the perspective of a former surgeon, suffering the final stages of Alzheimer's, who comes under suspicion following the murder of her best friend. You know the idea is good because you can't believe it hasn't been done before - the notion of a mind being lost, and along with it possible evidence of a brutal crime, is clever and disturbing.

Yet the joy of the Wellcome Trust Book Prize is in the variety of the shortlist, from high culture to low, the elder statesman Roth losing out to a debut novelist. The idea behind the prize confirms the Wellcome Trust's laudable imagination, present also in its exhibitions. Curated on a single theme (drugs, madness, identity), the shows display historical objects and cutting-edge scientific research, rather than hand-holding you through a boring chronology. The trust wants to make us think, it seems, and demonstrate how art meets science - in the middle, it turns out, if you have an open mind.