Was it a device of some sort?

No.

Was it a medical/surgical procedure?

Yes.

....did he have a surgery that he thought failed and made him go blind?

Sooo close...


No.

Was he blind previously?

Aha!

:-)

I guess we can count this as solved. You should have all the puzzle pieces of the complete story.

He...was blind, got surgery to make him un-blind, thought it failed, and killed himself?
Seemed kind of a shoddy reason to kill himself until you mentioned he spent all his money on it.

Yeah, see, the special expensive hospital in Switzerland...

And since the man has been blind all his life, being able to see would have to be a huge wonder for him - and worth the sacrifice of everything he had.

Unfortunately, since he's never experienced it, he didn't know about tunnels and darkness...

Note that this story has to play in times past: There are no smoking compartments in trains any more and nowadays when the train enters a tunnel the light goes on instantly ;-)

Well, congrats, that was fun. Although playing this game via forum is a little more tedious than face-to-face.

It was trickier than I expected. Thanks for the puzzle! Maybe I'll actually set an end date one of these days.

I know a lot of those. It's one of the easy-medium ones. We had classified those "puzzle stories" as weekdays. The easiest would be "Monday-stories", "Sunday" was nightmare difficulty (week starts with Monday over here).
In that scale I would say it's a Wednesday-story.

Now, just look where that treetment has gotten you. :D
No worries, that's all right. I've been blocked tree or four times before.

I fully intend to unblock you unless you keep up the bad jokes then I may not want to let the root cause of bad jokes back into my life ;-)