Recalling all the erroneous things that doctors have been able to say about sex or madness does us a fat lot of good. I think that what is currently politically important is to determine the regime of verediction established at a given moment... on the basis of which you can now recognize, for example, that doctors in the nineteenth century said so many stupid things about sex.... It is not so much the history of the true or the history of the false as the history of verediction which has a political significance.

Lecture 2, January 17, 1979, p. 36 - The Birth of Biopolitics (1978)